Advocates Concerned by Shipment of Horse Meat Through U.S. Ports
Published:
February 27, 2013
As concerns over horse meat
infiltrating products labeled ground beef grows among American consumers, an
advocacy group released shipping documents showing that horse meat does pass
through at least one United States port on its way from slaughterhouses in
Mexico to destinations in Europe.
The Equine Welfare Alliance
unearthed bills of lading showing that since last August, more than 30 million
pounds of fresh and frozen horse meat came into the Port of Houston on its way
to distributors in Belgium, the Netherlands and Russia.
“The shipments come out of Tampico,
the port closest to some Mexican slaughterhouse operations, and go through
Houston, where they are broken up and sent out to various companies in Europe,”
said John Holland, president of the alliance.
Shipments that pass through ports on
their way to another country are typically under the jurisdiction of Customs
and Border Protection and kept separate from other goods while waiting to be
loaded onto ships.
The question is whether such
transshipments, first reported by KPRC, the NBC affiliate in Houston,
are legal under a Texas law banning the sale, transfer or shipment of horse
meat for human consumption.
In 2008, Greg Abbott, then the
state’s attorney general, determined that the Texas law, passed in 1949,
applied even to transshipments of horse meat for human consumption. He ruled
that the state law did not interfere with federal laws on interstate and
foreign commerce.
A United States Supreme Court ruling
later that year, however, suggested that federal law might trump state laws in
such matters, said Wayne Pacelle, chief executive of
the Humane Society of the United States. “I have some doubts about whether the
Abbott decision would still be valid and whether a federal court would allow
Texas to try and halt those shipments,” Mr. Pacelle
said in an e-mail.
Nonetheless, Mr. Pacelle,
Mr. Holland and others speculated that because ports are often porous places,
it would be possible for horse meat from the shipments going through Houston to
end up in the United States.
Ever since a recent scandal erupted
in Europe in which horse meat was found in ground beef products, consumers in
the United States have been looking more closely at the packages of the ground
beef they buy and discovering the meat comes from Canada, Mexico and other
places in Latin America where horses are slaughtered for human consumption.
Dee Mansfield, a consumer in
Tennessee, said she had been “shocked” to find that a package of ground beef
she bought at her local grocery store contained meat from Canada, Mexico and
Uruguay. “I’m a horse lover,” Ms. Mansfield said, “and for me to think that I
have the possibility of horse meat in my freezer literally makes me sick.”
No evidence of horse meat being
mixed into ground beef has surfaced here, but several horse advocacy groups are
testing samples of ground beef to determine whether it contains horse meat. “We
have investigations going all over because it’s very, very likely that the same
situation going on in Europe is also going on here,” said Simone Netherlands,
director of Respect4Horses, a horse welfare organization.
Canada is the only country that the
Agriculture Department allows to export any horse meat to the United States.
Some zoos feed horse meat to lions and other large carnivores, said Steve
Feldman, a spokesman for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.