RIDE WEST
EQUINE INSIDER
Posting Bail Allen Warren of Horse Harbor Foundation stands next to a “bail” rescue that his organization, part of The Homes for Horses Coalition, saved from slaughter.
A practice known as horse “bailing”—online bidding to stop horses from going to slaughter—is controversial in the equine rescue community. Some say it’s the last line of defense, while others call the practice a “scam” with a corrosive effect on the equine rescue industry. Story and photography by RYAN T. BELL
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N A THURSDAY AFTERNOON in November, a Quarter Horse mare identified simply as “Hip 433”—the number of an auction sticker glued to her hip—was being ridden for her life. In a video posted on Facebook, a horseman wearing a baseball cap, canvas jacket and baggy jeans rode her across the gravel parking lot in front of a red sale barn in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. The
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rider exaggerated the loose rein with which he rode the mare. She didn’t exactly snap around with each cue, but it was clear she’d been trained at some point by someone with soft hands. The video was posted to a Facebook page called Moore’s Equines for Rescue, along with a notice that the mare’s “bail” was set at $942.55. The page is run by Brian Moore, a horse buyer in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, known to ship weekly
W E STER N H O R SEM A N
truckloads of horses to a slaughter plant in Canada. The Facebook post warned that if Hip 433’s bail was not paid by the following Tuesday, she would be loaded onto one of those trucks. Some 250 miles away in Schoharie, New York, a horsewoman named Dotty O’Neill saw the posting for Hip 433. “I have a bad habit of checking Moore’s Facebook page every day,” O’Neill says. “It tugs on your emotions because these horses have no voice. If you don’t act fast, they can end up standing nose-to-tail on the meat-man’s truck.” When U.S. horse slaughter plants ceased operating in 2007, an unintended consequence was a spike in the number of horses shipped for slaughter in Canada and Mexico. A report published in 2012 by the U.S. Government Accountability Office states: “From 2006 through 2010, Canadian and Mexican imports increased by 148 percent and 660 percent, respectively, with the total number of horses imported from the United States for slaughter increasing from about 33,000 in 2006 to about 138,000 in 2010.” Auction barns in states located near the United States’ northern and southern borders, such as Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Texas and Washington, became hubs for “kill buyers” filling delivery contracts to slaughter plants in Canada and Mexico. Their job was made all the more easy by the economic downturn of 2008, which saw horse owners dumping their animals at sale barns in droves. A report by the Animal Welfare Institute shows a spike in the total number of horses sent to slaughter between 2008 (98,963 horses) and 2012 (166,572 horses), demonstrating how the
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