“Bute is banned by the FDA for use on animals destined to become food”
The whole M. Wells Horse Tartaregate got me looking into the matter of horse meat in greater depth and intensity. I’m now writing a piece on it for a national publication and will hope to share it soon.
I think it’s terrific that Chef Dufour bowed to pressure from animal advocates and scratched plans to add raw horse meat to his MoMA PS 1 menu. But, the more I looked into the ethics and legality of serving horse meat, the more I found myself sidetracked by the remarkable threat horse meat poses to public health. All those hip adventure eaters who attended the Mooga Booga food festival last May in Brooklyn and ate one of Dufour’s now legendary horse-meat-foie-gras-pork-fat-grilled cheese sandwiches (he sold 5000) might be in for a shock to learn that their knee-weakening soupcon of horse flesh was a chemically infused carcinogenic chunk of flesh that makes pink slime look as innocent as an apple.
Think about the supply chain. Much of the horse meat produced by Canadian slaughterhouses (where Dufour sourced) and exported globally comes from discarded American race horses. Spent American race horses are understood by the industry to be more of an industrial byproduct than a source of food. The horse “product” was nurtured to run around a track and win bets made by fat cats and hucksters, not to become part of a heart attack inducing sandwich sold to slobbering epicureans at a food orgy.
Raising an animal to be a product that runs in circles for money means treating its body like a pharmaceutical landfill. Race horses are systematically injected with chemical cocktails potent enough to, as John Hershey once said of James Agee’s alcohol use, “stun a rhinoceros.” This laundry list of chemicals includes the carcinogenic phenylbutazone, or “bute.” Bute is banned by the FDA for use on animals destined to become food. It is, in a word, deadly. And it bioaccumulates in horse flesh.
Many commentators have declared Tartargate over. I’d hold your horses on that one. Last June a slaughterhouse company called Equine United announced plans to open a horse slaughterhouse in Missouri. It declared that it would slaughter horses “humanely” and distribute the products globally and domestically. Most interestingly, United Equine assured us all that the USDA would be regulating the safety of the meat produced. When a reporter I know called the USDA to ask how it would regulate the use of bute, the representative had no idea what bute was. She had to spell it for him.
Click (HERE) to visit James McWilliams’ blog and to Comment
Related articles
- MoMA Café Chef To Serve Illegal, Tainted Horse Meat? (rtfitchauthor.com)
- NY Reporter Promotes Poisoning Public with Tainted Horse Meat Entree (rtfitchauthor.com)
- For The Love of Horses: No Horse Slaughter Plant Yet For Missouri As Antagonists Continue Opposition (rtfitchauthor.com)
- Testing Finds More Contaminated Horse Meat (rtfitchauthor.com)
- NJ Governor Christie: Eat No Horse Meat (rtfitchauthor.com)
- Outcry Scuttles Plan to Put Horse on a New York Menu (dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com)
Categories: Horse News, Horse Slaughter
Straight from the Horse's Heart 
If that Representative has such a lack of knowledge on what bute i, I wonder what will be the fate of those who are cruel enough to eat such a sacred creature.
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That seems to be a common thread with the fed’s they hire people who are clueless about the subject and no experience in the area they were hired for and are paid peanuts.
Even a little education can be dangerous.
R.T. keep up on this story.
The more the public is educated rather than snow balled the better the out come of this.
I also noticed indirectly that human resources are urged to hire new grad’s with little to no experience in the field they are hired in. The federal government is no different. The long term unemployed with experience would have spotted this problem and blew the whistle on the subject. I’m sure this is just a spit in the wind that is about to become a flood of embarrassment for the feds.
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Well, while I don’t disagree with the overall point (horsemeat isn’t a qualified food source for humans)… I take GREAT exception to the “point” that American racehorses are the primary provider of Canadian (or Mexican, for that matter) butchered equines.
No Sir/Ma’am….racehorses (TBs) are approximately one third the “supposed” discarded equines. And that number is NOT verifiable….it is an extrapolation.
The biggest contributor to the horsemeat world is the AQHA, followed by Paint and backyard breeding stoopids. How to prove it? Check USDA stats. Are those stats correct??? Probably NOT!!!! BECUZZZZZZ….IT’S DONE VISUALLY BY “INSPECTORS” AND, AND…BASED ON REGISTRATION NUMBERS; that does not account for all the equines, wild and domestic that aren’t registered.
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watch Democracy now on wild horses , Amy Goodman interviewed Pro politica today 10/10/12
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Hello? Duh??This is what we’ve all be saying to the stupid people who insist that that slaughter is the best and only way to go for all the overcrowding we have in the BLM stock pens now and to all the auctioneers who insist on selling to the kill buyers and the lowest bidder! The horses could have been given antibiotics, wormers, or any other medication that is not okay for human consumtion after the fact. That’s why we have the FDA!
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Did watch Democracy now with Dave Phillips. Hes got quite a few things wrong, but does seem to care about the horses. Whether he can do enough good from his article & this broadcast to make up for damaging the investigation that was going on – Idont know.
Wish someone could tell him that its not “old or used up” domestic horses that are going to slaughter and that the wild horses arent “feral”. Maybe while hes researching information for his book – he will become more enlightened.
I guess the most important thing is getting the word out to people who arent involved with horses in their daily life.
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