Ag Dept releases photos/video of hideous cruelty at horse-butchering plant in Texas
By Russ Kick at 17 February, 2009, 5:35 pm
Due to a Freedom of Information Act request to the US Department of Agriculture, the animal-welfare organization Animals’ Angels received around 500 photos, and a video, showing nauseating cruelty at the Beltex Corporation’s horse-slaughter facility in Texas. That abattoir has since closed, but Beltex still operates a slaughterhouse in Mexico and a “slaughter horse feedlot” in Texas where horses are kept until being sent to Mexico.
The photos, video, and accompanying documents are posted at this page. No images are displayed on the page;
However, if you want to risk vomiting and nightmares, this page displays some of the photos.
You can also read the PDF press release from Animals’ Angels, the group that filed the FOIA request. Note that the press release contains several sickening photos. Below is the text of the press release, minus the images.
Press Release
November 2008
Animals’ Angels
phone: 410-848-3153
fax: 410-848-0213
www.animals-angels.com
Animals’ Angels, an animal welfare organization
based in Maryland, last week 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.
