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WSJ Serves Up Tainted Journalism On Horse Slaughter Plate

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This article is more than 10 years old.

Wall Street Journal reporters Douglas Belkin and Nathan Koppel are in good company. On May 3, they published an article on horse slaughter so eerily similar to articles appearing in a variety of unrelated publications, even ol’ Rupert Murdoch himself might be left wondering.

How did they all end up using the same specific phrases and anecdotes? Twist so many of the same key facts? Quote the same people and ultimately, critically, leave out so much available data on the issue? Were journalists cribbing off a PR script prepared by the horse-slaughter lobby? Has anyone called Scotland Yard?

Origins of a Disinformation Campaign: Rebranding Slaughter

The horse-slaughter lobby represents a handful of powerful industries looking to bring horse slaughter back to the U.S.: meatpackers and slaughter operators, for one thing. Cattle ranchers and the Farm Bureau. Then there’s the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) and pharmaceutical companies (like the makers of Premarin). Finally, there are the horse breeders and breed registries like the American Quarter Horse Association (AQHA) and American Paint Horse Association (APHA).

Naturally, they don’t like being identified as the “horse-slaughter lobby.” That sounds too mean. Instead, they call themselves “the horse industry.” This may sound like a generic classification for horse-related businesses and professionals, but it’s not.

You can own a racing stable, breed or show horses or run a veterinary practice, but if you’re among the 80% of Americans opposed to slaughtering horses, you’re not official “horse industry” according to “horse industry” people. They’ve appropriated that term to make their views seem mainstream, all while painting public opposition to slaughter as emotional and dangerous animal-rights driven extremism.

This is all a clever bit of disinformation, since 80% of the public is a very large group of Americans. It includes a long, bipartisan list of the members of Congress, business leaders and professionals both in and out of the horse world, entertainers and regular old Americans—all of them opposed to slaughtering horses in the U.S. or exporting them to slaughter.

Currently, horses are being exported to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico. This has been going on for years, even when U.S. slaughterhouses were open. What has changed is the provision for federal horse slaughter inspections ready to lunge forward thanks to a closed-door session that took place in November, 2011.

Essentially, three pro-slaughter U.S. Congressmen removed language banning inspections of horse-slaughter operations in an agricultural appropriations bill that was signed by Congress and President Obama.

The “horse industry” is doing all it can to seize the opportunity and push horse slaughter down the American public’s throat—with the right PR and the media’s help.

The distinctions—between the pro-and anti-slaughter sides and between foreign and domestic slaughter—are important for the public to know because key legislation is being pushed at the local, state and federal level.

Right now, battles are being waged over whether or not horse slaughter will be banned or legalized across America—and changing the public attitude is key to changing laws that prevent horse slaughter.

In fact, many of the laws proposed would legalize horse slaughter and then go the extra mile to give away taxpayer-funded subsidies and provide protection from legal claims made against the horse slaughter plants.

The “horse industry” is naturally working hard to bend public perception, beginning with their substitution of the words “humane processing” or “horse harvesting” for the infinitely grittier, more cruel-sounding “slaughter.”

The rest of the industry’s storyline has been similarly recast and repackaged for easy consumption. As of now, the “processing/harvesting” version has found its way into the majority of media coverage on this issue, of which Belkin and Koppel’s article is only the latest and most obvious example.

Decoding the Disinformation Script

The script recycled by The Wall Street Journal features a familiar cast of characters all tasked with supporting a different aspect of the “horse industry’s” central premise: Horse slaughter is good—for you, me, the economy and even horses.

A critical aspect of the script is that no other factors are considered that don’t support the central premise. Another aspect is ever-present anecdotal evidence and the absence of supporting data.

Take Jim Smith, the likable 67-year-old horse rescuer at the center of Belkin and Koppel’s piece, Reviving Slaughter of Horses: Rules Changed as More Animals Are Cut Loose by Their Owners in Tough Times.

Jim Smith’s role is to make the case that a “rise in horse abandonment” and the horse industry “going to hell in a hand basket” can both be tied to the same source: a lack of domestic slaughter.

He tells a story—about horses being dumped in Eminence, MO—that Belkin and Koppel accept as evidence of a growing, national trend. But where’s the evidence that it’s related to slaughter? There isn’t any.

There is no proof that anyone has released even a single horse because of a lack of slaughter—either in Eminence, MO, or elsewhere. None.

Horses may indeed be showing up, unaccounted for, across the U.S., but it’s just Jim Smith’s—and the pro-slaughter lobby's—guess as to why. There could be many reasons: Job loss? Skyrocketing hay prices? Hole in the fence?

The argument tying abandonment to slaughter is being used specifically because nobody knows where the horses come from. Nobody ever mentions the more likely motivation that someone might wish to avoid taking them to auction because they are afraid they will go to slaughter, or they are afraid their sorry condition will be seen and reported.

Interestingly, Koppel was directed to a white paper with data on horse abandonment by John Holland, president of the Equine Welfare Alliance, presumably to round out the WSJ piece that would appear later that week.

The EWA is a dues-free 501(c)(4) umbrella organization representing over 200 member organizations and hundreds of individual members worldwide in 18 countries. It’s been tracking stories of abandonment ever since they started popping up in early 2007—oddly, before the last U.S. horse slaughter plants had closed down.

If You Don't Read The Newspapers, You're Uninformed. If You Do Read The Newspapers, You're Misinformed.

The EWA analyzed a large number of stories published claiming horses were being abandoned because of a lack of slaughter. These reports ranged from reclaimed strip mines in Kentucky to the Florida Everglades and Oregon ranches. For a year, each of these was investigated and found to be false or hugely distorted.

Then, in 2010-11, there were an increasing number of authenticated reports of abandoned horses. Most of these turned up in the remote stretches of the southwest Border States. A few of the horses actually had hide removed, apparently to obscure a brand.

Over the course of a six-month investigation, EWA concluded that 5,000 horses found abandoned had actually been dumped after being rejected for slaughter by Mexican officials. The horses were rejected under a new system of controls implemented in December, 2009. Reasons for rejection included health problems, advanced pregnancy and injuries.

“Ironically, while the horse slaughter lobby has been claiming that abandonment was a result of a lack of slaughter, it now appears it is in large part a result of the practice,” Holland concluded.

He emailed a paper to Koppel documenting government data showing the real reasons that the horse market had been suffering in recent years: hyper inflation of feed and fuel costs. But none of that made it into The Wall Street Journal article. Was it because it didn’t prove the point Koppel and Belkin were intent on making?

This was also true of the reporters’ handling of the 2011 GAO Report—a big wet kiss to the horse industry from Montana Senator and rancher, Max Baucus.

Belkin and Koppel credit the GAO report with influencing Congress to reverse a five-year ban on funding for slaughter inspections. But they fail to point out the report’s underhanded political motivation and missing data.

"One must wonder how something so flawed rationalized such a change in policy,” said Caroline Betts, a USC associate professor of economics, after reading the report. “Congressional staffers perhaps did not understand it and read only the intro and the conclusion,” she states. “If a student had given me this paper, they would have gotten an 'F'."

John Holland warned Koppel in their phone conversation that the GAO Report was worthless. “I told him its findings are pure anecdote. No data. Nothing to support their conclusions. It’s all based on pro-slaughter testimony,” he says.

But Koppel was unmoved about the GAO’s flaws the same way he was also unmoved by a history of slaughter’s devastating environmental and economic impact on communities like Kaufman, TX.

Holland emailed Koppel a presentation on it and former Kaufman Mayor Paula Bacon provided a letter about her town’s experience that she’d sent to The Wall Street Journal back in 2005, when it first published one of several misleading articles on horse slaughter and slaughter plants.

“We chatted a couple of minutes and Mr. Koppel told me this new article wasn’t going to be about slaughter’s impact on communities,” Bacon says. But that assurance was contradicted three days later, when Belkin and Koppel’s article appeared.

There, two-thirds down the page, was a quote from Rick De Los Santos, the president of Valley Meat Co., which wants to open a plant near Roswell, N.M. “This would be good for our economy,” Santos states.

Belkin and Koppel take him at his word, including the 50 jobs that Valley Meats says it will bring to the community.

No mention is made that slaughter jobs historically go to undocumented workers—or that Valley Meat was temporarily shut down by the USDA in February, 2012, for failing to comply with humane regulations in its cattle slaughtering operations.

That’s because talking about undocumented workers and humane violations is not part of the script. Neither is any discussion of food safety issues, primarily the handful of legal medications administered to 90% of horses that are illegal when administered to animals raised or slaughtered for human consumption.

Nor do Belkin and Koppel talk about a proposal to open a slaughterhouse in the Ozark town of Mountain Grove, MO, just 70 miles from where Jim Smith looks after his rescue horses and hopes that slaughter will resume in the U.S.

Not A Good Fit

What happened in Mountain Grove? Well the horse industry’s chief lobbyist and spokesperson, Wyoming State Senator Sue Wallis, presented a proposal to build a slaughter plant at a town meeting that didn’t go over well. Tempers flared.

You would never know that from Belkin and Koppel’s account of how people in Jim Smith’s neck of the woods view slaughter opponents, though.

“In the Ozarks, patience for animal-rights advocates who oppose horse slaughter is limited,” the reporters wrote.

“That’s a crock,” says Holland. “The people of Mountain Grove ran Sue Wallis out of town.”

In other news accounts, Sue described her departure from Mountain Grove in more PR-friendly terms. Her version of events: the town was “not a good fit.”

Neither is the pairing of an otherwise trusted news source—and its reporters—with a public disinformation campaign orchestrated by corporations and their lobbyists.

This one should be clearly labeled for what it is: unfit for human consumption.

For more on this topic, visit my personal blog, follow me on Twitter and on Forbes.com or read these related posts:

MoMA Café Chef To Serve Illegal, Tainted Horse Meat?

How Safe Is That Horse Meat?

Paula Bacon, Texas Mayor, Kicks Some Tail

Life in a Slaughter Town: Kaufman, Texas (photo gallery)

How Many Congressmen Does It Take To Screw A Horse?

Who's Who in Capitol Hill's Horse Meat Power Posse (photo gallery)

Contraceptives For Wild Horses Are Just What The Government Ordered

Rounding Up America's Wild Horses (photo gallery)

Horse Slaughterhouse Investigation Sounds Food Safety and Cruelty Alarms

Saving Princess Madeline—A Racehorse's Tale

Racing Industry Silent on Slaughtered Thoroughbreds