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When the Dallas Crown Inc. horse slaughter plant operated in Kaufman, plant operators bought the small North Texas city a large American flag to place outside the American Legion Hall. In retrospect, that flag did nothing but to make “a mockery of our values,” former Kaufman mayor Paula Bacon told the Texas Senate Committee on Agriculture & Rural Affairs.
It would be better, she said, to have a “lead-smelting plant and sex-oriented businesses up and down” a city’s main drag than it would to have a horse slaughtering facility in any Texas town. Bacon was among many who came out to a four-hour meeting at the Capitol to testify and show their opposition to the possible resumption of horse slaughtering in Texas – for meat that is then primarily shipped to Europe and Japan for human consumption – a practice that has been banned in the state since 1949.
In Kaufman, which was home to one of three U.S. slaughterhouses when the industry was effectively shuttered in 2007 (the others were in Fort Worth and in Dekalb, Ill.), the industry brought with it nothing positive, Bacon testified; crime was high while the plant operated there, she noted, and the burden the plant placed on the city’s environmental infrastructure, including on its water treatment facility, was enormous. Indeed, during the mid-Eighties, the plant was shuttered for nearly a year because neither the plant nor the city’s water treatment facility was able to process the blood from the slaughtered horses, which was full of antibiotics. “Literally, blood was coming up through the streets,” she testified, “and into people’s bathtubs.” In a single 19-month period, she said, the Dallas Crown plant was “out of compliance” 487 times, racking up 23 local citations that would have cost the company nearly $1 million; they never did pay up, she said. When the plant finally shut down its operations, the city of Kaufman was able to breathe a collective sigh of relief.
via No Country For Old Horses? Senate considers horse slaughter – News Blog – The Austin Chronicle.
via No Country For Old Horses? Senate considers horse slaughter – News Blog – The Austin Chronicle.
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