ShareThisEarlier this year in Perris, Calif., an emaciated 3-year-old filly was found tied to a fence post, abandoned.
Villa Chardonnay, a nonprofit horse sanctuary in Temecula, agreed to take the animal, named her Hope and started trying to bring her back to health. Within 36 hours, Hope was dead.
"It was just tremendously horrible," said Louise Gardner, one of the sanctuary's founders. "For us, that was a big tragedy."
Such tragedies are increasingly common, fallout from a federal law change and a coinciding economic downturn.
In the four years since Congress enacted a ban on the slaughter of horses in the United States, cases of horse abandonment, neglect and abuse have increased markedly, the federal Government Accountability Office said in a report released in June.
At the same time, the report found that the ban has not stopped people from transporting horses to Mexico and Canada for slaughter.
The unintended consequences of a law meant to protect animals are evident. In Riverside County alone, the number of stray horses picked up by the county's Animal Services Department steadily rose from 20 in 2006 -- the last year before horse slaughters were banned -- to 74 last year.
Strays essentially count as abandonment, since few owners come forward to retrieve the animals. That was the situation for another skinny horse found near Palm Springs this spring. The horse was malnourished and unable to swallow properly because of an obstructed esophagus. Riverside County's chief veterinarian, Allan Drusys, had it put down.
"The underlying issue is the lack of venues to dispose of these animals," Drusys said. "I can understand why people in kind of desperate situations turn to desperate means."
Drusys said it costs several hundred dollars to have a horse euthanized and taken away.
Owners who are unwilling or unable to pay that much may simply turn them loose. Many horses have been left to fend for themselves in the Santa Ana River bed. Some of those picked up by the Animal Services Department are rescued or adopted out, while about a third of them are put down. Gardner said others are being released in rural areas.
"When the government closed the slaughterhouses, there was no preparation for what we should do about it afterward," says Gardner.
"They say there is a herd of about 30 horses free in the wilderness," she said. "People are very concerned that they're going to die because they don't have any water to drink."
The number of horses at Villa Chardonnay, which depends on contributions, has increased from 20 to 40 in the past year and a half. As in Hope's case, some were abandoned. Others were relinquished by owners who said they could not afford to feed both their horse and their children, Gardner said.
The sanctuary's alfalfa costs have risen from $2,000 to $4,500 over the past year, she said.
It's difficult to tell how much of the increase in horse abandonment is a consequence of the region's economic strife and how much is a result the ban on horse slaughter, Gardner said.
In 2007, Congress barred any new horse slaughterhouses from opening and the nation's last three -- in Illinois and Texas -- closed down. Until then, more than 100,000 horses were slaughtered annually; most of their meat was exported to foreign countries where it is considered a delicacy.
Gardner said she supports the ban, but she lamented that the government took no action to allow for easy disposal of horses through other means.
"When the government closed the slaughterhouses, there was no preparation for what we should do about it afterward," said Gardner, who suggested creating a horse registration tax or government grants that could be directed to sanctuaries and shelters that care for abandoned animals.
Meanwhile, the ban has done little to stop the slaughter. From 2006 through 2010, U.S. horse exports for slaughter increased by 148 percent to Canada and 660 percent to Mexico, the GAO report found. Thus, the animals are simply driven further, often under harsh conditions, to the same end.
Seeking to stop the phenomenon altogether, Sen. Mary Landrieu , D-La., has long pushed legislation that would ban the transport of horses for slaughter. More than 20 senators, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., have co-sponsored the bill, but it has yet to move forward.
(Contact Ben Goad at bgoad(at)PE.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif.
