09/12/2024
‼️ Warning ‼️ Long read‼️
This past weekend, I watched an auction and what happened at this auction explained a lot as to why “regular rescues” are struggling financially. It is not because there is no donor money available since there are mass bailing rescues and killpen rescues that are bringing in millions of dollars (yes you read that correctly – Millions of Dollars!)
Yesterday, I read about a Texas rescue shutting down because of lack of donations. This morning, I spoke to another rescue director that’s closing their rescue because of lack of donations. Wherever I look, horse rescues are shutting their doors for lack of donor support. Heck, if our rescue did not have a private foundation helping us, we would have had to shut down last year already. We are the largest Arabian horse rescue in the United States. Let that sink in. We would have to have shut down!
Killpen fundraising and large scale mass bailing “the slaughter truck is coming” fundraising operations are what is suffocating the local “regular horse rescues” financially. There are only so many horse loving donors available, it is a finite number of donors. Regular horse rescues lose donors to the emergency fundraising schemes out there.
If donors have to choose between giving their $20 to a horse that is said to ship to "certain death" if a donation is not received immediately and an owner relinquished horse that a rescue is taking in, the donor will most likely choose the "certain death horse". It is the urgency of the situation, the dire position the horse is perceived to be in, the hard core online pleas that make the donor choose the ”certain death horse” rather than the owner relinquished horse from around the corner. After all, the feeling of “yes, I helped save a horse from death today” feels great to the donors.
And here is the problem! The "certain death horse" is not shipping to its death. It is a marketing ploy to get donations. How do I know this? Stay with me, I will explain.
Do horses ship to slaughter? Yes they do, no question about that. However, when a horse trader/slaughter shipper gets an order for 35-40 horses, they will ship 35-40 horses. They pick the healthy fat young horses to ship to slaughter. The horses that I have personally observed that were in actual ship to slaughter pens waiting on transport, were healthy, young, fat, big horses. This is also backed up by statistics of what horses ship to slaughter. Several years ago, it was fat young quarter horses that were discarded by breeders. Most recently, it has been unhandled young, fat reservation horses that have been rounded up by the thousands and sadly some branded mustangs. But, it was mostly unhandled feral horses that were shipped to slaughter.
They do not ship the skinny old broken horses. Those are fundraised for and sold to line the pockets of the horse traders who wants to make some extra cash. Plus these horses tug at the donors' heart strings and they will open their wallet, so they make an easy fundraising opportunity for killpen and mass bailing organizations.
Why are the slaughter shipping order for 35-40 horses? Because that is how many horses fit into the slaughter shipping trailer and that is how many horses fit on the slaughter manifest paper form. The process of putting a load of 35-40 horses together, requires the horses to be microchipped and listed on a slaughter shipment manifest with gender and age, line by line. This document must be signed off by a veterinarian, certifying that the horses do not have certain illnesses and that they are healthy. Once the veterinarian has signed off the manifest form, it is submitted to the USDA office with a processing fee of $56. The USDA office usually takes two to three business days to process the shipping manifest document and approves it. Once the USDA approval is received, the 35-40 horses can be loaded onto the trailer to be shipped to Presidio, TX or to El Paso, TX where they are dropped off, processed further, and then they are loaded onto another trailer to cross the border into Mexico.
It is a horrible process, no denying that and I break out in tears every time that I see a real manifest that has been processed by USDA and I know that these horses listed were slaughtered. It needs to stop! No question about it. But, I am telling you about this process because donors are duped when they see the fundraising posts that say things like, “donate so that we can get these horses because they ship tomorrow”.
The slaughter horse trader would be committing fraud if he pulled some horses off the slaughter trailer because his paperwork would be incorrect now. The microchip numbers would not match the horses. The signed veterinary certificate would be a falsified document now. And even if this kind of thing was possible, even if the horse trader and the veterinarian were willing to commit fraud, the shipment would now be two horses short and two other horses would have to be found to take the “rescued horses’” place.
And if the horse trader and veterinarian wanted to do things correctly, they would have to cancel the shipment of 35-40 horses and would have to redo the slaughter shipment manifest paperwork and start all over again. This would delay the shipment of the ordered slaughter horses by two to three days and would increase the horse trader’s operating cost.
Do these last minute “rescue the horses from the slaughter truck” fundraisers make sense in light of this information? Yet, donors frantically donate to these kinds of fundraisers.
Most of the posts that you see on social media with “will ship to slaughter” fundraisers are for horses that the horse trader wants to sell to make extra money, these horses were never meant to ship to slaughter. The “last minute ships to slaughter” fundraisers of horses that may look sad, but were never part of the slaughter pipeline either, they are meant to make some extra money for somebody.
But, donors give their money to these types of fundraisers and their local rescues that desperately need donors support go without, even though these rescues keep horses out of harms way in the first place.
I watched videos last weekend of pleas for the horses to be kept off the slaughter truck at a large auction. Thousands of Dollars rolled in. One rescue director walked through the pens saying. “I am here at the killpen auction…” when the first part of the auction is for catalog horses with horses selling for as much as $20,000 and the second part of the auction is for less expensive riding horses. Does the auction house have a slaughter shipping contract? Yes, they do. Do any of the rescues bid against the auction owner when he buys horses in the loose auction portion of the auction weekend? No, they do not. So no matter what, the slaughter shipper/auction owner gets the number of horses for shipping to slaughter and none of the rescues bid against him.
Another rescue director was at the auction buying donkeys for up to $1,000 per donkey. Normally one donkey sells for $50 to $200. Word spread and everyone and their grandmother went looking for donkeys to bring to the sale. Easy money for donkey owners willing to sell their donkeys! But it was donors who funded all of this. This artificially created a supply of donkeys at way above market price. I do not know how many $1,000 donkeys they purchased, but I can tell you that these donkeys had not been in danger of shipping to slaughter in the first place.
Another rescue director featured skinny broken horses to prevent them from shipping to slaughter. As discussed above, they were not slaughter bound horses in the first place. Does a skinny medical type case horse need help. Yes, of course, the horse needs help, but it is done with “ships to slaughter” type fundraising.
Also, when rescues attend auctions to buy skinny sickly horses, word spreads and horse owners and horse traders looking to make a quick profit will find those skinny horses to bring to auction.
We had a case of this in Southern California when a local mass bailing rescue sought out the skinny horses to fundraise for them to keep them from being “shipped to slaughter”. They always attended the same auction and the director was caught making deals with a horse trader to starve a certain horse, so that the horse would be even skinnier the next week. She told him to bring the horse back skinnier because she knew that people would donate more. Fortunately, this rescue was shut down.
But, these practices are reminiscent of the fundraiser videos and posts that I saw last weekend. I am not claiming that this particular rescue at the auction is doing what this Southern California mass bailing director was doing. But it does raise eyebrows.
It is training donors to only give when a horse is presented as in danger of slaughter or at the brink of death.
It trains the donor to ignore the “boring” pleas of regular rescues who want to support an elderly owners, owners in need, law enforcement seizures, and from small local auctions.
I have had someone tell me that taking in an owner relinquished horse was not rescue work. I wonder how many other donors believe the same? Yet, the regular rescues are the ones preventing horses from ending up in the hands of horse traders and so called killpens in the first place.
As time goes on, with more local regular rescues closing their doors because of lack of donations and the few multi-million mass bailing operations being the only ones left, there won’t be safe havens for local horses anymore. Let that sink in.
Yet these mega-mass bailing rescues’ actions are doing nothing to stop horses from shipping to slaughter. They use emotional videos of horses as they are loaded into trailers to squeeze the last dollars out of donors.
The shipments continue. Fortunately, in recent years, slaughter export numbers are down because demand drives supply. But if the Mexican or Canadian slaughter house wants 100 horses, these traders will ship the 100 horses, no matter how much money is paid in donations to “stop the slaughter truck”. The only way to change this and to stop horses being exported to Canada and Mexico is to pass legislation to outlaw it. Period!
