Secretly Taped, Horse Hauler Admits to Using Invalid Health Documents—PETA Files Complaints With State Agencies
For Immediate Release:
March 26, 2013
Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382
Kalona, Iowa -- A PETA undercover investigator has documented evidence of serious violations involving apparent fraudulent veterinary health forms in the transport of horses across state lines from Iowa into Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. Twice last year, a PETA investigator rode along with a "kill buyer"—someone who purchases horses and transports them to slaughterhouses or feedlots—as he moved horses from the Kalona Sales Barn to feedlots in Oklahoma and Texas. The kill buyer was caught on tape admitting that the test forms he carried "certifying" that the horses in his trailer were free of equine infectious anemia (EIA)—a potentially fatal viral disease with no known cure or preventive vaccine—were actually those of other horses, not those of the horses on board his truck, and that his veterinarian had taught him how to falsify the EIA forms.
Although the Texas Animal Health Commission and the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food, and Forestry had been made aware that the kill buyer, by his own admission, was bringing horses into the states without valid EIA paperwork—and unloading potentially infected horses onto crowded feedlots, risking the health of hundreds of other horses—the agencies have taken no action. PETA is now calling on officials to investigate this failure to act and has posted action alerts on its popular website urging its supporters to do the same.
"Agency inaction means that potentially infected horses traveling from Iowa to Texas may have spread this deadly disease from the Oklahoma and Texas feedlots to entire states," says PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk. "While agencies look the other way, kill buyers like this one are still transporting horses today."
For more information, please visit PETA.org.