Racetrack Drugs Put Europe Off U.S. Horse Meat
By JOE DRAPE
Published: December 8, 2012
PARIS — For decades, American horses, many of them retired or damaged
racehorses, have been shipped to Canada and Mexico, where it is legal to
slaughter horses, and then processed and sold for consumption in Europe
and beyond.
Christinne Muschi for The New York Times
A slaughterhouse in Saint-André-Avellin, Quebec, where meat is processed for sale in Europe.
Multimedia
Christophe Simon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A horse meat butcher shop in France.
Michele Bollinger
The racehorses Canuki, left, and Cactus Cafe were
rejected for slaughter after tests showed they had been medicated.
Lately, however, European food safety officials have notified Mexican
and Canadian slaughterhouses of a growing concern: The meat of American
racehorses may be too toxic to eat safely because the horses have been
injected repeatedly with drugs.
Despite the fact that racehorses make up only a fraction of the trade in
horse meat, the European officials have indicated that they may
nonetheless require lifetime medication records for slaughter-bound
horses from Canada and Mexico, and perhaps require them to be held on
feedlots or some other holding area for six months before they are
slaughtered.
In October, Stephan Giguere, the general manager of a major
slaughterhouse in Quebec, said he turned away truckloads of horses
coming from the United States because his clients were worried about
potential drug issues. Mr. Giguere said he told his buyers to stay away
from horses coming from American racetracks.
“We don’t want them,” he said. “It’s too risky.”
The action is just the latest indication of the troubled state of American racing and its problems with the doping of horses. Some prominent trainers have been disciplined
for using legal and illegal drugs, and horses loaded with painkillers
have been breaking down in arresting numbers. Congress has called for
reform, and state regulators have begun imposing stricter rules.
But for pure emotional effect, the alarm raised in the international horse-meat marketplace packs a distinctive punch.
Some 138,000 horses were sent to Canada or Mexico in 2010 alone to be
turned into meat for Europe and other parts of the world, according to a
Government Accountability Office report. Organizations concerned about
the welfare of retired racehorses have estimated that anywhere from 10
to 15 percent of the population sent for slaughter may have performed on
racetracks in the United States.
“Racehorses are walking pharmacies,” said Dr. Nicholas Dodman, a veterinarian on the faculty of Tufts University and a co-author of a 2010 article
that sought to raise concerns about the health risks posed by American
racehorses. He said it was reckless to want any of the drugs routinely
administered to horses “in your food chain.”
Horses being shipped to Mexico and Canada are by law required to have
been free of certain drugs for six months before being slaughtered, and
those involved in their shipping must have affidavits proving that. But
European Commission officials say the affidavits are easily falsified.
As a result, American racehorses often show up in Canada within weeks —
sometimes days — of their leaving the racetrack and their steady diets
of drugs.
In October, the European Commission’s Directorate General for Health and
Consumers found serious problems while auditing the operations of
equine slaughter facilities in Mexico, where 80 percent of the horses
arrive from the United States. The commission’s report said Mexican
officials were not allowed to question the “authenticity or reliability
of the sworn statements” about the ostensibly drug-free horses, and thus
had no way of verifying whether the horses were tainted by drugs.
“The systems in place for identification, the food-chain information and
in particular the affidavits concerning the nontreatment for six months
with certain medical substances, both for the horses imported from the
U.S. as well as for the Mexican horses, are insufficient to guarantee
that standards equivalent to those provided for by E.U. legislation are
applied,” the report said.
The authorities in the United States and Canada acknowledge that
oversight of the slaughter business is lax. On July 9, the United States
Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter to an Ohio feedlot
operator who sells horses for slaughter. The operator, Ronald Andio, was
reprimanded for selling a drug-tainted thoroughbred horse to a Canadian
slaughterhouse.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency had tested the carcass of the horse
the previous August and found the anti-inflammatory drug phenylbutazone
in the muscle and kidney tissues. It also discovered clenbuterol, a widely abused medication for breathing problems that can build muscle by mimicking anabolic steroids.
Because horses are not a traditional food source in the United States,
the Food and Drug Administration does not require human food safety
information as it considers what drugs can be used legally on horses.
Patricia El-Hinnawy, a spokeswoman for the agency, said agency-approved
drugs intended for use in horses carried the warning “Do not use in
horses intended for human consumption.”
She also said the case against Mr. Andio remained open.
“On the warning letter, the case remains open and no further information
can be provided at this time,” Ms. El-Hinnawy said.
A New York Times examination of American horse racing
showed an industry still mired in a culture of drugs and inadequate
regulation and a fatal breakdown rate that remains far worse than in
most of the world. The examination found that 24 horses died each week
at America’s racetracks and that in one recent three-year period, more
than 3,800 horses had positive drug tests, mostly for illegally high
levels of prescription drugs.
Many American racetracks bar owners and trainers from running horses at
their facilities if they are caught sending horses for slaughter, but
the cases are difficult to prove. Last May, however, a Quebec
slaughterhouse operated by Viande Richelieu returned the former
racehorses Canuki and Cactus Cafe to Mark Wedig because antislaughter
advocates and racing officials in Ohio and West Virginia were able to
show that the horses had been given medications.
Horse meat remains a delicacy in Paris and in other countries for an
older generation of Europeans. Henri-Previen Chaussier, a butcher who
sells exclusively horse meat in the 13th Arrondissement of Paris, said
demand from individual customers was still strong, but he had only one
restaurant on his client list, the Taxi Jaune in the First
Arrondissement.
“Excellent,” he said of the taste of his product.
Jerome Paviet, a horse-meat wholesaler, said about 30,000 tons of horse
meat was consumed annually in France. He said most consumers are older
than 45, because during and after World War II, doctors promoted horse
meat as a healthy alternative to other meats that had become scarce.
Still, Mr. Paviet has moved his business online because of the lack of
outlets.
Mr. Paviet said that he started his Web site, www.ma-boucherie-chevaline.com,
three months ago and that business had been steady. As a distributor,
he said, he expects his meat to comply with the medication rules and be
safe.
“We don’t really know if a horse has been treated,” he said. “We expect
our Canadian slaughterhouse to be doing their job in controlling the
quality on their end.”
Mr. Giguere, who runs the slaughterhouse in western Quebec, said that
200 to 450 horses a week were processed in his facility. He said that in
addition to the Canadian authorities on site for testing, his company
also performed random residue tests and occasionally spot-checked the
drug use affidavits and other veterinary records of the horses it
acquired.
He said he expected that more and stricter regulations would be handed
down related to the handling of horses for consumption in the European
Union.
“It’s not a perfect system,” Mr. Giguere said. “But I’m confident our
meat is safe because we work hard at keeping it so in a heavily
regulated industry. Three years ago, there was nothing.”
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