Straight Talk With A Killer Buyer……Making Sense of It All….

This Article Was Originally Printed In Quarter Horse News …….
I found it on the Million Horse Links site. It is titled Straight Talk With A Killer Buyer……Making Sense of It All…..I assume since it available on a public website link I am not breaking any copyright rules……
This could be a story written from the personal perspective of any number of horse buyers I am familiar with in any given area of the country. This article rebuts the idea slaughter is still business as usual. So as John, Vicki and the crowd tell us, any spike in abuse only proves THEIR side. Mr. Smith explains this first hand from someone who has been there through the whole mess in person.
Editor’s Note: It’s the policy of Quarter Horse News to not use anonymous sources in articles. However, we are making an exception. “Bob Smith” is a businessman, a trader with over 20 years of hard-learned experience in buying and selling horses. He also has a ranch and he buys and sells cattle. He is afraid to allow his name to be published. This is because he often buys horses, some of which he transports to slaughter plants. Many times, he has received threats and even had guns pointed at him by people who believed he was violating the rights of horses and endangering their welfare. The organized views of slaughter ban proponents are heard loud and clear, on Web sites, in newspapers and magazines and on broadcast segments. This time, we’re going to hear a little about the situation from the other side of the issue. Be sure to visit http://www.quarterhorsenews.com/ to view an extended version of this Straight Talk with photos and additional quotes. It’s a fact that horses are still going to slaughter. From the period of January to May, comparing 2007 to 2008, exports of live horses to Canada are up 68 percent and to Mexico there has been an 84 percent increase. These increases are explained by the ban on horse slaughter in the United States (for the full story, please see the two-part horse slaughter update written by Rebecca Overton on http://www.quarterhorsenews.com/ or the June 1 and June 15, 2008, issues of Quarter Horse News).
Making Sense Of It All…..There are hundreds of people in the United States who make their livings buying and selling horses, some of which go to slaughter. Some call them “killer buyers.” It’s not a nice designation, but it’s the plain truth. “Bob Smith” is a killer buyer. Of course, most of the horses he buys and sells end up as riding horses, breeding stock, pasture ornaments and family pets. But there is a percentage – he figures about 30 percent – that end up going to slaughter.
Smith used to transport his slaughter horses to Illinois and Texas. Now, he regularly makes trips to Canada. Those hauls take anywhere from 30 to 40 hours and require at least two days to complete. The horse slaughter ban has made it tough on Smith’s business, especially in light of increased fuel costs. But Smith contends that the real victims of the ban are, ironically, the horses.
Market supply. There’s been a documented decrease in the value of the lower- and middle-level horses in the past year. Smith attributes this to the horse slaughter ban and the resulting oversupply of horses at the bottom end. “It’s crazy because the horses are poor,” he said, pointing out that he has seen a drop-off in the number of healthy, well-conditioned horses at the local sales. “People don’t care no more. It’s worse now than what it was when the plants were open, 10 to one. “Sometimes you’ll give the horses away after you pay the commission because they won’t bring $15, $20 apiece. By the time you pay the $20 Coggins test, the $10 yardage and 8 percent commission, you’re back in the hole.”
Smith acknowledges that prices are holding for the nicely bred, well-broke, useable horses sold at well established or well-publicized sales. It’s at the local or regional sales – the ones held on the same day every month, every week – that horses, even the broke ones, are bringing significantly lower prices.
“This is where it all starts from. If you look, 90 percent of them end up at the local auction. I bought 14 horses last night for $900. Most of those horses cost $35 - $40 each. “If they were worth anything, why are people turning horses out in the national forests and in the coal mines? They dump them at our place. We get two to four horses a week – just thrown out. We don’t know where they come from. We’d rather not have them. You lose money on them.
“We had a blind horse dumped at our place. I called the Humane Society to come and get it. It took them three weeks. The matter of fact was that they had to give it away before they could come and get it.”
For the draft-breed horses, Smith says the value has dropped significantly. “Those horses that go by the pound, there’s no outlet for them and you’re seeing a lot more of them in poor shape. A Belgian horse isn’t worth a dime when he gets where he’s going. You cannot buy him for $10 here and truck him up there [to Canada]; it won’t pay your gas. It’s not worth fooling with him.”
Irresponsible breeding, Smith sees a lot of sick, undernourished and unsound horses at the sales. But he believes that even more stay home. “People won’t sell them because it costs money. They’d rather starve them to death. Because when you take them to market, you’ll owe $30 to $75. Used to be that even if your horse was thin, you got something for him. They won’t sell them. They’ll just keep them out in the pasture. Would you sell him if you had to owe the sale barn when you got done?”
Sales have been cancelled this year and Smith has noticed a drop-off in the number of horses being auctioned. But he has not noticed a coinciding slowdown in the breeding. “I’ve sold more studs now to breed this year than I did when the slaughter plants were open. You’ve got old Molly out there in the pasture; you want to raise you a colt. Why go to the auction to buy you a horse when you raise one out of Molly there? They have 20 to 30 horses out there and they’re not worth nothing. They just keep them out there and let them keep breeding. “It’s got worse. I don’t know why, but it has.” The inhumanity Transporting a horse to a slaughter plant, where he used to meet his end with a captive bolt, is not nice.
Making Sense of It - The Straight Talk with a killer buyer about his impressions of how the horse slaughter ban has impacted domestic horses. Katie Tims Quarter Horse News • August 1, 2008
Question is, was it humane?
“The people against the slaughter plants have never been to the horse auction,” Smith said. “They’ve got the picture of Black Beauty. If they’d come here, they’d understand. They’d see the poor horses. They don’t see it, they don’t want to see it, they ain’t going to see it. If they’d see it, they’d tell you to open the plants tomorrow.”
When slaughter plants operated domestically, Smith had to meet humane treatment standards on the horses he delivered to the facilities. “We had to fill out a form on each horse that it had no cuts, no bruises. We had to have compartments for the studs, to keep them separate. No one inspects them at all now.”
Smith believes that it’s the slaughter ban proponents who are responsible for the horses’ diminished situation. “They condemn everybody else for being inhumane, but we’re not. There is an inhumane way to handle everything. You know, it’s about as inhumane to leave that horse out there in that pasture and not fool with him, not care for him, as it was to bring him here and sell him for slaughter.
“That horse was watched over to the end. The captive bolt was more humane than choking a horse down enough to stick a needle in his vein. Most people have never seen that, but they’ve seen all the videos of horses being stabbed. That’s not the way it was here in the United States. The USDA used to watch over the whole process.”
Smith is tired of being portrayed as an evil person who abuses horses. “The horse trader does care about horses. It’s the way he makes a living. The horse trader will come to a local sale and take better care of the horses than the public does. That’s my opinion. Sometimes, accidents do happen. It’s that way with anything – with your horses, with your cows, with your dogs.”
Horse traders, Smith insists, understand the reality of the situation while animal rights advocates catch only glimpses. He says they don’t see the horses before they get to sale, the ones kept at home for too long because they’re not worth selling. “People have no idea of what’s going on. They think they’re helping the horses, but they’re just killing them.
“If the Humane Society and PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] care so much, why don’t they come get those poor horses at the sale barns? Why don’t they pick them up? Those are the ones that need saving. If they want to help those horses, there are places to go get them. Go get those things. Instead of waiting for the horse to sell for less than the consignment fee and yardage, go give the man $20 for a Coggins test. They could have more horses than they ever dreamed of.”
An emotional issue, Smith’s words say it all. “You have no market value at all for a poor horse and you get in trouble with them. Any time you load a poor horse up and take him somewhere, you’ve got the PETA people all over you. Even the horse that comes from a bad home and you’re trying to get him to a good home, they still get on you.”
Sometimes, it gets a little more personal. “There are crazy folks. They’ll shoot guns. You pull up in your driveway at home and they’ll be sitting there at midnight or in the morning. That’s the truth of it.”
At the sales, people try to get recorded goods to support claims of mishandling and abuse. “When we’re loading horses at night, they’ll hide over there with video cameras,” Smith said, pointing to bushes about 50 yards from the loading chute at a sale yard. “I see them over there, I just ignore them. And that’s not even on the slaughter horses but it’s on the broke horses, as well. It’s horses in general.”
One time in Greenville, Miss., Smith had a woman driving a station wagon force him over to the side of the road. His truck was loaded with quarantined horses diagnosed with equine infectious anemia.
“She pulled a .38 on me, right in the middle of town,” Smith said. “She had a badge and said she was with the Humane Society, one of the boss ladies of it. “She took me to the agri-center and they had a Quarter Horse show going. I had to go, she had a .38 pointed at my head. She unloaded the quarantine horses off the truck into the agri-center with all the other horses. Then she turned around and went out there, bought shavings and bedded the floor of the trailer down with shavings. “She loaded the horses back on the trailer and she said she was going to check me back at the state line. There was another guy that was there and he took me to the back roads. I took a dirt road to the Greenville bridge and went right into Arkansas. It made no sense.

I didn’t change a word, but thought it might bear repeating.
RH1