Source: Mary Ormsby and Dale Brazao Staff Reporters of THESTAR.com
“I’m just buying the horse for the (meat) plant and that’s it”
Backstreet Bully, a former Frank Stronach racehorse, had been given a drug linked to bone-marrow disease in humans and yet was slaughtered at a Quebec abattoir in January, though it is unclear whether his meat entered the food chain. Photo by Michael Burns
The horse “passport” Canada relies on to keep toxic meat off dinner tables around the world is open to fraud and error, a Star investigation reveals.
Using undercover reporters, the Star found problems with passports — which are supposed to detail a horse’s complete medical history — for several horses headed to the slaughterhouse.
The Star also obtained 10 passports, nine of which were incomplete or mistake-filled.
In some cases, signatures did not match the names of people claiming to be the horse’s owner. In other interactions witnessed at a busy Waterloo-area auction house, the document was partially filled out by an auction-house worker instead of the owners.
What was seen at auction confirms the findings of an international audit obtained by the Star: that Canada’s ability to trace prohibited drugs in food-bound horses “is inadequate” to protect consumers. Some common horse medications, like “bute” and nitrofurazone, are linked to causing bone-marrow disease and cancer in people if eaten in meat.
Canada’s equine information document is the first step in protecting the public from drug-tainted meat. The document is a type of animal passport that relies on voluntary ownership disclosure of information such as a horse’s physical description, its primary use — racehorse, for example — and drug history.
About $90 million in horsemeat from more than 80,000 animals is exported from Canada annually. Each horse to be slaughtered is to have a passport stating it is free of drugs that would be dangerous to humans if consumed. Horsemeat is a common dish eaten in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Japan and Quebec, and is even available at select restaurants in Toronto.
Concerns over public exposure to tainted meat has intensified in recent years as thousands of racehorses — raised on powerful drugs to boost performance — enter the slaughter pipeline, most of them coming from the United States into Canada since the closure of U.S. slaughterhouse facilities in 2007.
Meanwhile, Ontario’s cash-strapped racing industry has fewer tracks, race dates and prize money than a year ago — rendering thousands of racing thoroughbreds, standardbreds, quarter horses and their breeding stock unnecessary.
European Union food safety regulators have pushed Canada for tighter passport and drug-testing controls for domestic and American horses. But the Star’s investigation, where we examined specific cases, found horses with drug histories that should prevent them from becoming food can easily slip through the system.
In two cases tracked by the Star, Backstreet Bully, a former Frank Stronach racehorse, and Holly, a 23-year-old trail horse, were sold at the Ontario Livestock Exchange auction near Waterloo with false or misleading claims on their passports.
Backstreet Bully was slaughtered in Quebec in January, though it is unclear whether his meat entered the food chain — neither the government or slaughterhouse officials would tell us. Backstreet Bully had been given multiple doses of phenylbutazone (bute) and nitrofurazone during his life.
Holly narrowly escaped the same fate in March, rescued from a meat buyer’s holding pen when the horse was tracked down and purchased for $805. Holly had also been given bute and nitrofurazone just weeks before she was sold at auction. (Read the Star’s full account of Holly’s rescue in Saturday’s Star.)
“If you come right down to the bottom of this and the majority of these racehorses have had some of these (prohibited) drugs administered, what good are any documents, really?” said B.C. New Democrat Alex Atamanenko, who is pushing a private member’s bill, C-322, to severely restrict horse slaughter in Canada.
The Star’s undercover investigation took reporters to the Tuesday horse sales at the Ontario Livestock Exchange. To see how carefully passports were completed by horse owners, Star reporters mingled with the public and horse dealers on two separate trips.
Dozens of horses were trucked in both mornings from around the province and herded from trailers into auction-house holding pens. Lot numbers were glued to their sides to identify them to the public, who wandered around the pens studying the animals until the noon bidding began. In the sales ring, there was little vigilance of passport accuracy; even when the auctioneer announced to potential buyers that the owners’ names and signatures didn’t match on some forms, those horses were still sold.
Auction houses are not responsible for overseeing passport accuracy; that is the role of slaughterhouse operators, according to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the country’s food safety watchdog. However, it is the horse owner’s duty to provide full and correct identity and medical history information for their animal; making false statements is illegal.
Most of the purchasing at the auction was done by slaughterhouse suppliers like Jeff Grof and Jonathan Lalonde, who are commonly called “kill buyers” — although farmers and families can pick up bargain-basement animals for pennies a pound. One dirty colt, with no takers, finally sold for $5.
“I’m just buying the horse for the (meat) plant and that’s it,” said Lalonde, who estimates he purchases between 25 and 30 horses every Tuesday from the auction, known to insiders simply as OLEX.
“When we’re buying the horses, they are supposed to have the papers filled out by the old owner,” he told the Star in a recent phone interview.
Lalonde bought Backstreet Bully for about 26 cents a pound on Jan. 8 and Holly for about 46 cents a pound on March 26. Unlike Backstreet Bully, who went directly to slaughter, Holly had a few days’ grace in an Ottawa-area feedlot because Lalonde thought he could resell her for $700, plus $105 for board — double what he reportedly paid for her at auction.
Many powerful veterinary drugs given to sport horses are prohibited in animals destined to become food because those drugs can be toxic to people. The passport is mandatory paperwork for slaughter-bound horses but additional information, such as veterinary records to support drug-free claims, is not required.
A five-page government passport template is available online but it is not mandatory to use that version. The horse industry is permitted to create a shorter form — usually a single sheet of paper, the Star found — that excludes some questions suggested by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
European Commission auditors twice visited Canadian slaughterhouse facilities in 2010 and 2011, to inspect areas from sanitation to drug-testing procedures for a variety of animals. With horses, auditors found particular fault with passports accompanying American animals trucked to slaughterhouses from the border.
“Those horses imported from the United States of America for direct slaughter, the equine identification documents received were not reliable, with verification only being made possible by residue (drug) testing,” the 2011 audit states.
The passport “doesn’t provide even a modicum of reassurance” that all horses are safe to eat, says lawyer and author Bruce Wagman, a San Francisco animal law expert who has studied the European audits.
Wagman calls the Canadian slaughter system unreliable, dangerous to the global food supply and one to avoid emulating should the U.S. resume slaughtering horses for human consumption after a seven-year shutdown, as is being proposed.
“The EID is not serving the purpose it’s purportedly intended to do, which is to ensure no adulterated meat goes into or out of the country,” said the lawyer.
“It can’t, because the document doesn’t guarantee anything.”
Wagman contends passports are “prone to abuse” by people “motivated by financial gain and have no way, really, of accurately filling out the document because many of them just got these horses within days (of completing the form).”
Wagman is petitioning federal U.S. food agencies on behalf of animal welfare groups — including the Humane Society of the United States — to drastically tighten federal drug requirements should horse slaughter south of the border be revived.
Nearly 300,000 horses have been slaughtered at Canadian plants since 2010, when the equine information document was introduced to better identify animals and the drugs. The European Union, whose member states trace domestic equine from birth to death with lifetime passports, has for years pushed for tighter horsemeat vigilance in Canada.
A proper passport system would do a great deal to protect the public, people involved in the horse world say, particularly as more and more horses are slaughtered. One equine expert recently estimated that Canada’s overall horse population of about 900,000 will be reduced to about 600,000 over the next few years because of reduced racing in Ontario.
Secrecy surrounds the passports once a horse reaches the slaughterhouse. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency can only access passports stored at the country’s four federally registered equine slaughter facilities.
Federal rules state that slaughterhouse operators “shall investigate incidences of potential (passport) falsification and take necessary action,” according to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. It was unclear what slaughterhouses are to do if they find a problem and the government agency refused to disclose how many, if any, people have been prosecuted for passport fraud.
Jonathan Lalonde, who supplies Quebec abattoirs, told the Star he sometimes phones horse owners to supply the missing passport information and writes it in himself. Otherwise, the horse may be rejected at the slaughterhouse.
Equine Canada has been working on a birth-to-death traceability system for all horses in Canada built on existing industry data tracking programs (like racehorse registration papers) and may include the use of microchip implants. The system, called CanEQUID, would also track horses to be processed for meat. But government funding to fast track CanEQUID has not materialized for the past five years since horses aren’t considered a “priority species” for food safety and livestock traceability, according to Equine Canada.
Horsemeat is a lucrative business. It is Canada’s No. 1 red meat export to Europe; Canada supplies the continent with about 24 per cent of its total.
The top five purchasers of Canadian-processed horsemeat in 2012 were: Switzerland ($22 million); Japan ($19.8 million); France ($19.7 million); Belgium ($17.6 million) and Kazakhstan ($6.8 million).
The U.S. was next in line, spending nearly $2 million on horsemeat — but for zoo animals. Horsemeat is not allowed to be sold commercially for human consumption in the U.S.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency insists the current system is safe because government inspectors at the privately owned abattoirs will not allow any horse with incomplete or inaccurate passports to be slaughtered for food.
“The CFIA’s top priority is food safety,” the agency wrote in an email to the Star.
In addition, agency inspectors conduct visual examinations and random drug testing of horses and carcasses to ensure they are free of banned drugs. Some horses are targeted for testing if an inspector has cause for concern. Testing is so sensitive, drug residues can be detected in parts per billion — trace amounts.
In a recent email to the Star, the agency said it is working with the horse industry to “develop measures to enhance equine traceability.”
The agency says it does not directly act on fraudulent passport claims.
Click (HERE) to visit theSTAR.com
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Categories: Horse News, Horse Slaughter
Straight from the Horse's Heart 
Please note that Stronach’s employees attempted to save/purchase Bully, but the killers refused to cooperate and murdered him instead.
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OMG !! SUE , THey are imbecilic morons , !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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No. More like vindictive….
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WOW!!!!!!
This is one of the best journalism expose’ on HCHS I have ever read.
Bravo!
The kb’s and CFIA officials sound like human sewage smells.
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May those “Kill Buyers,” along with others who condone the slaughter of these “special souls,” receive their JUST REWARD, paid back by God!!
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Amen!
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I want them to “suffer” now by being shutdown….what they do to the human food chain is not only immoral because of the suffering of these equines…IT IS CRIMINAL WHAT THEY ARE ALLOWED TO DO TO CONSUMERS.
God can deal with the hereafter; we can take care of the NOW!
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Amen.
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It’s so hard for me to look at that picture of Backstreet Bully and think of him as “slaughtered.” To think that some people just look at animals as food and not see the whole picture is beyond me. Sometimes I think that people eating the toxic remains of those animals is the karma-aspect of it all. We all make choices in this world; and to every action there is a reaction. So remember, choose wisely!
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Exactly Susan !!!
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You’re right on, Susan. It’s really upsetting and very disgusting to think people feel the need to consume the meat from such beautiful, loyal, intelligent animals. It’s beyond comprehension how we allow this barbaric and inhumane practice to continue knowing the destruction it causes from the beginning to the final end, which is consumption of meat known to be toxic. All in the interest of those who put greed over responsibility…very sad and unfortunate for the innocent.
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It’s not even food, it’s their almighty buck..
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I hope that everyone who eats horse meat shall one day choke on it!!!!!
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This is truely an evil world. People think that rodeo livestock are mistreated, but to raise a horse just to run in a race and drug the animal to make it faster, what is that considered? Then the disrespect of that animal, by sending it to be slaughtered, this evil planet deserves what it gets. I am glad I won’t be around to watch these same people start eating their dogs or have them sent to a slaughter house to have doggie steaks made out of them. The greedy bastards shouldn’t be able to sleep at night and I hope their blood money takes them down.
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What an utterly disgusting way to make a living. The lowest of the low. Parasites.
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For starters this blatantly proves that they have no regard for any living being. No regard for the horses, for the people who care for them, for the real animal lovers of the world, nor for the people who actually think that consuming the meats of a horse is safe. It proves that they do not care who dies in any part of the slaughter pipeline. The concept of murder is something that many people would NOT intentionally conceive yet a small number of people attempt or commit it. So for the balance of humanity who would NOT consider or commit these crimes its irreprehensible that anyone do this NOT only to the animals but to spread cancers (which are a death sentence) to small children or adults who may or may not know they are consuming horse meat. We cannot understand what drives men and women to forceably deceive the animals have come into our trust and have been cared for so dearly. This patronizing of the pro-slaughter people who state the meat is safe and once again, Sue Wallis posts-the meats are safe and they have withdrawal periods. There is NO withdrawal period once BUTE or NFZ or Regu-mate is in a horses body-the total body concentration is such that we have NO idea how much quantity of the medications the animals have received. So with NO idea, suppose we said the animals received one pill or one NFZ dressing-the regulations BANNED the animals-yet there in the chain, with the opportunity to kill someone in a slow progressive way undetected until virtually too late. One thing to relay to the sports enthusiasts such as tracks, if they continue to find racehorses in the Canadian slaughter chain, then the US race horses should be boycotted. In order to throw down the gauntlet and say we are DONE with this horrible death for horses who work their hearts in honest, integrity, and with furor to attempt to win something they themselves will never recieve, the money, the trophy, and the glory-so we can NO longer allow them to take away the one thing the horses deserve, their lives! So if we have to let the racing industry know that what they are doing is wrong, we will have to move 4ward with this quickly. Horses are NOT one minute ownership, they are a commitment and for those who don’t wish to honor the commitment then its time we changed who makes the commitment to own. As normal people we do not attempt murder nor condone it, we try to reckon the circumstances to make things avoidable so no one is harmed. In that same regard it’s hard to look at the slaughter industry and NOT see it from both points of view, from the harm we need to stop for ALL horses and the harm we have to STOP from Children and Adults around the world. This article was upfront and supportive of the issue and blatant in its findings-the harm realm of slaughter lay cut wide open-that’s what we need to do, continue to dissect the self-serving industry and administer to it the final blow to the slaughter houses ugly head.
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After reading this story, went back & read the one for Holly, the older mare. Cannot imagine how frustrating and scary that was for her owner & the people who cared about her. The kind of person who would sign a free lease agreement – lying about getting the horse for her daughter – and then lying all over again when she was confronted. Sure does tell you the kind of people involved with the whole kill buyer – slaughter pipeline – as if we didn’t know it before!!! NO help from the police whatsoever! THATS what gets me – its just oh well – go call someone else.
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I have read the story about Holly- it just shows to what links people will go to to make a buck- and to use your daughter to get horses is disgusting- she should be put in jail- and for the governments of those other countries to condone the slaughter of horses just makes me sick!!!!!
Horses are not for humane consumption- EVER!- We have to be the voice for those that can’t speak for themselves- and as far as I am concerned we the people pay the politicians pay checks should they not listen to what us AMERICANS are saying? Stop Horse slaughter of get the hell out of office, we don’t want your kind making our decisions for us.
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Some people try to play god and no well at all .I don’t remember anything in the bible stating that our animal’s should be drugged to perform as expected.no were they put to death for no reason.the world should stop and see what is happening its not pretty.
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I hope these horses come back to haunt them.
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cant imagine that “errors” in paperwork is of any surprise, they just got caught. Inspectors paperwork was most likely also fraudulent. This is why all the horse slaughter houses were closed here in the US.. Besides the drugs in the horses systems, what about their living conditions? Standing around for months in manure and urine, eating crappy hay. Do they check for other contaminates? Like diseases, viruses, bacteria…..I know someone who rescued several horses from a slaughter house. 1 horse in particular had what they thought was cellulitis, turns out because she had been standing/living in squalor turns out the mare had a rare type of cancer. What about the adrenalin that flows through their system as they are being mutilated?
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I realize race horses & “performance” horses ARE drugged so they can perform. But we who DO care for our animals medicate them to make them feel better. Theres a big difference. On the other hand – drugged or medicated or not – no animal deserves the treatment that the pro-slaughter crowd promotes. Sad thing is, after those 30 horses burned to death not too far from here – theres been nothing more said about it. I’m talking about newspapers – tv etc. There was MUCH said about it right here by all of you – but it didn’t seem to raise awareness locally. I guess it goes to show how little people care. And like patty, I agree, these poor horses need to come back & haunt the creeps that put them through this torture.
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You all should really go through the Rate My Pro webpage and read the dire things that so-called horse trainer, unbelievable breeders, and people who really are NOT horse people have done and are in trouble with the law for, especially the story of Stacey Lefever, I think I got the name right, she stole over a hundred thoroughbreds from owners willing to rehabilitate rescued and purchased outright thoroughbreds and she is the NEW face of the killer buyers. She took the horses in to train, talked a great game, then received the money for training horses every month and she did to over a 100,000 and then as the owners anxiously awaited riding their new steeds she would update them on the progress of training and all the while knowing the horses were brokered to a slaughter house and deceased. The owners began to get suspicious and she would soon not return calls, they went to find out where the animals were and found to their horror what had happened. Please understand that is the Other fear we have had of the NEW slaughter industry, the face of the killer buyer has changed and we can not be certain who to trust with any animals. I’m a trainer and I have witnessed 19 year old girls buying quantities of horses and then selling them to killer buyers, they were looking for something nice and horses being shipped to their deaths was a part of the process. So we don’t know who we are up against. The young lady from Oklahoma that had a horse cut to pieces because she was jealous of the people who owned the horses. We need to really look hard at who we are allowing to participate in this industry. Daniel and Carrie Ault from Strawtown Auction in Strawtown, Indiana were recently publicized for their plans to open a slaughter house in Indiana, the hazmat team was called in when they found literally dead bodies of all species of farm animals in their barn that they themselves called home. They lived in the barn with the dead and dying critters for months, all the while buying and selling animals at the livestock auction, working on the new slaughter house they were opening. This is a really harsh scene, the people who believe this is NORMAL are really scaring me that they want laws to protect them while doing these things. Anyone in the US should stop and ask themselves why would a horse trainer, Duquette, supposedly at the top of his game want to support a negative, predatory horror show like slaughter and support gag laws that endanger everyone. I mean would you ship your next great horse to him, cause what if your horse disappeared? We need to think about not just the spokes in the wheel, the tread on the tire, but also the tracks that are left behind….The new face of slaughter scares me more….this story of Holly used a daughter, folks this becoming common, we don’t want our teens and twentysomethings coming up doing this and a note to folks thinking horses ought to die, well maybe then those that want to kill should just get out of the horse industry-if there’s not enough money it, they can just quit. Go skydiving, preferably without their parachute!.
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