Texas and Oklahoma Investigate Horse 'Kill Buyer'

Authorities in Texas and Oklahoma are acting on complaints from PETA that a “kill buyer”—someone who purchases horses and transports them to slaughterhouses or feedlots—falsified forms certifying that horses who were being transported to slaughter were free of a deadly equine disease.

Twice last year, a PETA investigator rode along with the kill buyer as he moved dozens of horses he had purchased in Iowa through Missouri and Kansas to feedlots and transfer points in Oklahoma and Texas. The kill buyer was caught on tape admitting that the veterinary forms he carried “certifying” that the horses in his trailer were free of deadly equine infectious anemia (EIA)—a potentially fatal viral disease with no known cure or preventive vaccine—were actually those of other horses, not those on board his truck.

PETA alerted the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food, and Forestry and the Texas Animal Health Commission that the kill buyer, by his own admission, was bringing horses into the states without valid EIA paperwork, risking the health of hundreds of other horses when potentially infected horses were unloaded onto crowded feedlots.

The latest allegations in Oklahoma are part of a wider horse slaughter investigation involving allegations of stolen property, concealing stolen property, transporting stolen property across state lines, and other crimes.

What You Can Do

Obviously, this kill buyer needs to be brought to justice, but he is just one piece of a large and corrupt industry. This case is just more evidence of the pressing need to pass the Safeguard American Food Exports Act, which would make it illegal to slaughter horses in the U.S. and to transport them to slaughter in Canada and Mexico. Please contact your representatives today and urge them to support this vital bill.