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Thousands of foals slaughtered for popular drug They're a byproduct of Premarin, an estrogen replacement medication
WINNIPEG -- It's 10 a.m. on an oven-hot Tuesday at Winnipeg Livestock Auctions Ltd, site of the world's largest auction of pregnant mare urine foals. Over the next 14 hours, more than 1,000 horses -- most of them barely three months old -- will change hands.
A similar story will unfold in auction houses across the Canadian prairie this month, as tens of thousands of foals will be sent to their deaths, the industrial residue of a drug developed for menopausal women.
The foals are the living byproduct of Premarin, the most widely prescribed drug for women undergoing hormone replacement therapy in North America.
When they are born, their mothers will have spent five months confined in stalls and attached to lines collecting their urine, which provides the estrogens used in Premarin.
Canada, where the drug was developed, is also the world's largest producer. Last year, 4.9 million prescriptions were dispensed in this country alone.
More than 30,000 mares are housed on 402 pregnant mare urine (PMU) farms in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. From October to March, they produce 12 to 13 million litres of urine. About 80 per cent of them also produce live foals. But there's little demand for these foals, other than as horse meat.
Manitoba is the pregnant mare urine capital of the world. Last year, the province's farmers earned $43.9 million -- more than one per cent of Manitoba's total agricultural product -- from the production and sale of urine from about 27,000 mares.
Some of the foals the mares produce will go to riding clubs or individual owners. Some will be purchased by "rescuers." But most -- 16,200 last year in Manitoba -- will be slaughtered for export to Europe and Japan.
Winnipeg Livestock Auctions Ltd. sits on the northwest corner of the city not far from its horse-racing track. Inside, there is a ring for displaying animals, and a gallery of benches, rising about 20 tiers high, where the buyers sit.
Outside the bidding hall is a vast system of interlocking iron pens -- altogether about the size of a small shopping mall -- where the horses are kept.
The horses are packed tightly, 20 or more to a pen. Twenty wranglers -- some of them teenagers -- herd them in and out of the auction ring.
Collectively, the animals are referred to as "it" or "shitters." "We pack 'em in until there's no room left," one wrangler explains.
Today, there is a veritable sea of horses, most of them foals, in every colour of the equine rainbow: roans, paints, buckskins, greys, palominos and bays.
Many of the foals, weaned prematurely, try to suckle each other. In a few cases, their mothers are here to be auctioned off as well, but never in the same pen. It means the air is full of the sound of separated mothers and offspring whinnying plaintively to one another hour after hour during the long day.
Veterinarians say foals should be at least six months old before they're weaned, but Ellen Buck, an equine veterinarian with the Humane Society of the U.S., says it's clear that many of the horses on auction here are much younger. Some of them are not even two months old -- "cruelly premature," she says.
Between six and eight weeks, foals go through what Buck describes as an "immunity trough," when the mother's antibodies begin to recede -- but before the foal has built up its own immune system. "If it's weaned at this age, it is particularly susceptible to disease -- mainly respiratory diseases which can be serious enough to cause death," Buck says. "They also can get diseases in their joints which make it difficult for them to walk."
It also causes problems for the mothers. Buck has noticed one mare's udder so distended that she has permitted a number of strange foals to suckle on it to relieve the pressure. "That's really unusual," Buck observes, "but I guess she just couldn't stand the pain."
Unless something is done to ease lactating in a mare, Buck says she runs the risk of contracting mastitis.
Some of the older foals are in bad shape as well. One, about four months old, has hooves so inflamed it can barely stand. It tries, but it must lie down again because it can't get its footing. Buck also points to other foals which are clearly too thin, not much more than skin and bones.
Out back beyond the auction pens and the perpetual clouds of dust created by the livestock trucks, a freshly destroyed two- to three-month-old foal lies by three rotting dairy cow carcasses. Congealed blood marks the spot where one of its hooves was torn off. No one is around to say what happened, but a foal that can't walk is a foal that can't be sold.
Inside the auction hall, it's a full house. It's also oven-hot, airless, and choking with cigarette smoke. Everywhere you can smell cooking grease from the cafeteria upstairs, and tension.
That's because there are two kinds of people here -- buyers of meat and buyers of horses. It makes for an uneasy gathering.
The meat buyers, about a dozen of them, occupy seats right next to the ring. They smoke and throw back chips and burgers, while they calculate how much each horse is selling per pound. The idea is to buy low, fatten the horses in feedlots for three to nine months, and sell high when they go to slaughter.
None of them wants to talk about it, however. When Pat Houde, former champion bull rider and a feedlot owner in Elm Creek, Man., is asked for an interview, he says plainly: "You can leave any time. You people in the news have jerked me around, so if you know what's good for you, you'll leave." Asked if other meat buyers will comment instead, he says again: "I said, if you know what's good for you, you'll leave."
So it's left to people like Ray Kellosalmi to explain how the meat market works.
Kellosalmi is a Kelowna physician with a passion for animals, who travels to auctions such as this one each autumn to buy foals to bring back to B.C. to be placed in homes. He is a five-year veteran of sales such as today's.
He comes, he says "to save as many lives as I can." One year it was as many as 70. This year it will be 10. It all depends on how many customers he has back in Kelowna. Sometimes I feel I have to apologize to the horses I can't save," he says overlooking a pen full of foals crowding together like a single animal. "But I can't save of all of them. There are just too many."
He also comes to be a thorn in the industry's side. Sometimes he and other "rescuers" will bid for a horse they have no intention of buying, just to drive up the price. It's a kind of poker game they play with the meat buyers. "We don't want to give them too many bargains," Kellosalmi says. And if the meat buyers should call his bluff? "Then I've got myself another horse."
The game works. Often the meat buyers look around to where he is sitting when he places a bid, genuine or not.
The animals are herded into the ring individually, in pairs or in large groups, sometimes as large as 20.
Occasionally there are accidents. About two hours into the auction, a large iron door is slammed on the head of one of the foals. The woman sitting next to me, a veteran of horse auctions, sees me wince and says: "Yeah, it does hurt, but you get used to it. Once I saw a horse fall down and get trampled by all the others."
Regardless of how many foals there are in the ring, the price is always an individual one, because what's crucial is the price per pound. The auctioneer announces the type of horse on view, its size and sex, and then in a continuous rat-a-tat-tat language barely comprehensible to a newcomer, announces new bids and begs for more.
Prices are low today because there are so many horses for sale: 1,050. They range from as low as $70 for some particularly emaciated foals to several hundred dollars for a large horse. The auction house takes $15 for every horse sold that is over 1,000 pounds, and $11 for every horse sold that is under 1,000 pounds.
Ruby Stewart, a horse buyer and seller from Ericksdale, Man., says the large number of horses available reflects the price of hay which, because of this summer's drought on the prairies, has risen from an average price of about $25 a bale to $90.
She says that makes it too expensive for some farmers to feed their horses, so they sell them instead. Other farmers, she explains, can make more money selling hay to Alberta and Saskatchewan, where the drought was its severest, than they can selling mare urine. So the horses are put up for auction.
Stewart also suggests keeping an eye out for grey horses, which are prone to tumours. "They're good for nothing but zoo meat," she cautions.
When the auction is over, Kellosalmi has bought 10 horses. He buys according to the type of horses his customers want and which are the saddest ones. One of his acquisitions is probably six weeks old, says Buck, far too young to be separated from its mother. Another has lost his ears to frostbite.
Helen Meredith and her team from the California-based Pegasus Foundation, a large U.S. horse rescue group, have bought 90. Some will go to eastern states to be placed in homes, and others will go with her to California. A few other people have bought horses for riding as well. The rest have been sold for meat.
Kellosalmi's horses are taken to a nearby farm where they will stay until he can drive them to Kelowna on Sunday. He'll make the trip in one 22-hour stretch "so the horses suffer as little as possible."
On Wednesday, there's another auction, this time in Brandon, about two hours west of Winnipeg on the Trans Canada Highway. Buck and Kellosalmi are there, but Meredith has remained in Winnipeg. The only other buyers present this time are meat buyers, the same dozen or so who were in Winnipeg. Once again, they decline to be interviewed.
The horses, about 500 of them, are poorer quality this time. One especially young foal can barely muster the strength to walk into the ring. He still has his baby fuzz, and all his ribs and muscles are showing. He goes for $63.
On a tour through the pens, Kellosalmi notices that one of the foals has "casted," meaning that it's caught its leg between two bars in a gate. It's struggling to get free, but can't. None of the wranglers are around, so Kellosalmi climbs over the fence to help. "A horse shouldn't be in one position for too long or it can do real damage to itself," he says.
Back from Brandon, Kellosalmi and Buck visit Meredith at what was once a feedlot. She is keeping her 90 horses there. One has died from colic, and another has injured itself trying to jump a fence. But Buck says it will be all right once the wound is cleaned and dressed regularly. Otherwise the horses seem to be okay, and Meredith is busy preparing them to cross the border into the U.S.
All the horses Kellosalmi bought are fine, except for the relentless swarms of mosquitoes that surround them mercilessly. Kellosalmi's own hands are bitten raw by them. It's the latest obstacle in what has been a 16-hour endurance test of a day filled with heat, dust, mosquitoes, violence, sadness, frustration and tremendously hard work.
© Copyright 2001 Vancouver SunBut he doesn't care. To him all that matters is that he's saved 10 horses. "Ten horses that won't go to meat," he says, grinning like a child who's just found his presents before Christmas. "That's why I do what I do."
For those of us who love our horses, we know how important it is to take care of them. The sun affects them as well. Enjoy sitting under a good market umbrella with them.