Results from Freedom of Information Request show severe abuse previously undisclosed: New data provides over nine hundred reasons for the urgent passage of bill banning the slaughter of American horses.
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Beltex Transport Violations Part 1
Beltex Transport Violations Part 2
Beltex Transport Violations Part 3
Beltex Transport Violations Part 4
Beltex Transport Violations Part 5
Beltex Transport Violations Part 6
Beltex Humane Slaughter Act Violations
Animals' Angels received over 900 pages of documents and photographs from the United States Department of Agriculture taken during part of 2005 at the Beltex horse slaughter plant in Texas. Documents received 36 months after making a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, reveal an appalling number of incidences and an equally appalling degree of suffering sustained by horses. Evidence indicates alarming cruelty corresponding directly to horse slaughter.
The large FOIA document contains hundreds of photographs that graphically depict horses with open fractures, legs missing, battered and bloody faces, eyeballs dangling and what appears to be horses left to bleed to death. The document provides unimpeachable evidence for the immediate ban on the slaughter of American horses.
The photographs included in the FOIA document were taken between January 17, 2005 and November 17, 2005 at Beltex, the Belgian owned plant in Fort Worth, Texas. Beltex was forced to close this plant in 2007, after courts upheld Texas law that has banned horse slaughter since 1949. Beltex has since focused on its operations in Fresnillo, Mexico where it continues to slaughter American horses. In addition, Beltex still runs the second largest slaughter horse feedlot in the U.S. Horses from all over the country are transported to the feedlot in Morton,TX before being sent to the Beltex slaughter plant in Mexico.
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Animals' Angels latest Freedom of Information Act request only increased our concerns over the BLM's treatment of wild horses and burros. Among other things, the BLM's Palomino Valley Facility in Nevada seems to be drastically under-reporting the actual number of horses and burros that have died under its "care." In order to deal with the eventuality of equine deaths, the NV Bureau of Land Management has an ongoing contract with a rendering plant, Nevada By-Products (d/b/a Reno Rendering), to process the dead horses and burros received from Palomino Valley.
