Secretly Taped, Horse Hauler Admits to Using Invalid Health Documents—PETA Files Complaint With State Agency
For Immediate Release:
March 26, 2013
Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382
Morton, Texas -- PETA is calling on the Texas Animal Health Commission (TAHC) to investigate immediately why state officials have failed to act on 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. Last year, a PETA investigator rode along with a "kill buyer," someone who purchases horses and transports them to slaughterhouses or feedlots. 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 different horses. So potentially infected horses were unloaded onto crowded feedlots in Morton, risking the health of hundreds of other horses. Although the TAHC had been made aware that the kill buyer, by his own admission, was planning to bring horses into the state without valid EIA paperwork, the agency has taken no action.
"Agency inaction means that potentially infected horses traveling from Iowa to Texas may have spread this deadly disease from the Texas feedlot to the entire state," says PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk. "While agencies look the other way, kill buyers like this one are still transporting horses to Texas today."
The group has also submitted a complaint to the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food, and Forestry regarding its failure to prevent the same kill buyer from bringing horses with fraudulent EIA test forms to Oklahoma. En route to Oklahoma, he admitted that he uses forms for horses other than those on board his truck and that his veterinarian had taught him how to falsify EIA forms. PETA has also posted an action alert on its popular website urging its supporters to call on the TAHC to protect horses.
For more information, please visit PETA.org.