French Taste for Horseflesh Has Some Missourians Locking Barn Doors

“Future Home of Horse Killing,” reads a banner on Main Street. It protests a new French-run horse-slaughtering plant that has just begun operation in this southeast Missouri town of about 3,500 people.

The plant will process horse meat for the dining tables of Europe, an idea that runs smack against the American love affair with the horse.

Mary Voertmann of nearby Farmington, whose family breeds Arabian horses, is the organizer of Missourians Against Slaughtering Horses (MASH), a group working to get the plant shut down.

“I consider this to be a holocaust for equines,” she said. “These people are coming in here to rape the horse industry. This is an outrage!”

Archway Packing Co. plant officials have been trying to keep a low profile, but that has been difficult since they asked for and were granted state permission to slaughter up to 100 horses daily and ship the meat to France, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland and Holland for human consumption.

To horse lovers, that’s unthinkable. To John Cross, the plant’s operations manager, it’s just another slaughter operation.

“It’s like all other businesses in the United States,” Cross said.

Horse-slaughtering operations in the United States are nothing new. There are at least a dozen others, four in Texas alone, including one in downtown Ft. Worth.

Great Western Packing Co. of Morton, Tex., one of the largest horse-meat packers, has killed between 250 and 300 animals a day for 15 years with “no major public outcry,” said Ben Ansolabehere, president of the company.

“I think this is an industry that takes care of the animals that are no longer useful for the riding horse industry or the working horse industry, and provides a marketable price,” he said.

He said that his company, for which Cross previously worked as operations manager, pays between 40 cents and 60 cents per pound for a horse.

“We try to run a professional, first-class operation,” Ansolabehere said. “We put (horses) down in a humane fashion.”

The horses’ hides are used for sporting equipment and other leather goods. The meat and entrails are used in dog food and fertilizers. Although it is legal to sell horse meat for human consumption in the United States, most of it is used in dog food.

Why begrudge European palates?

“It’s a matter of taste, I guess, and I sure don’t want to taste it,” said Desloge Mayor Jack Rabaduex, who’s at the center of the conflict.

Eating horse meat became something of a necessity in Europe after World War II, when food was scarce. Since then, it has remained in demand.

Last year, the French consumed 61,000 tons of horse meat, although the younger generation seems to be losing its taste for it. In 1979, France consumed 97,000 tons of horse meat, and only one-sixth of that was produced in France.

Horse owners across Missouri, fearing their animals will be stolen for slaughter, have been expressing outrage to anyone who will listen and have disrupted City Council meetings.

They’ve generally made life miserable for Rabaduex and the council, which recently voted to allow the operation to come to town.

State Rep. Craig Kilby of Lake St. Louis also is keeping up the pressure. He said he will sponsor legislation to prohibit so-called “killer buying” of healthy, marketable pleasure horses for slaughter and export.

The Humane Society of Missouri also is opposed, noting fears that young horses as well as broken-down or ill-tempered animals will be slaughtered.

Plant manager Cross said that most of the horses slaughtered in Desloge will be bought at livestock auctions, where “everything from plug horses to good riding horses” are sold.

He scoffed at the notion that Archway would hire rustlers, buy animals from unscrupulous types or slaughter young horses. He and others in the industry say that the meat of young horses is tough and strong-tasting.

“There will always be some horses stolen, but they had that problem long before we got here,” he said.

The Desloge operation is on the outskirts of town, at the end of a dirt road just a few hundred yards from a Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall. Archway has moved into an almost new, 2,500-square-foot facility previously used for slaughtering cattle.

The horses will be killed, gutted, drained of blood and hung in a cooler within less than five minutes, slaughter room supervisor Jim Pyeatt said. The meat then will be chilled (not frozen), trucked to St. Louis and flown to Archway’s food distributor in France.

The plant will add jobs for about 25 people to the depressed economy of this region about 60 miles south of St. Louis. Pyeatt said he has taken more than 1,700 applications.

Pyeatt, who has eight years experience as a butcher, was a little leery about the job at first. Now he goes about town wearing his Archway shirt with pride.

“When I go into restaurants in town they’ll ask me if I want a pony burger or something,” he said, “but I was out of work, and this is what I do. I’m not ashamed.”

Not everyone here shares his enthusiasm.

“I hate to see it coming,” said housewife Larnie Penberthy, while pushing a shopping cart out of a discount store. “I think we could get better business here.”