SUGARCREEK — Roy Baker is not a popular man, but he’s a prosperous one. Baker is the owner of the Sugarcreek Livestock Auction in Tuscarawas County, which is one of the major horse auction venues in the United States. But most of the horses brought to Sugarcreek are not brought there to sell to families looking for a nice pet.

They are brought to be sold for slaughter.

While smaller, less frequent horse auctions are geared more toward buying horses for pets or work animals, the Sugarcreek operation is well-known for being an end-of-the-line place to dump old, ill or unwanted horses. The horses are bought by “kill buyers,” who transport them to slaughterhouses in Mexico.

“We’ve killed horses since the beginning of time,” said Baker. “I’m not for it and I’m not against it. Everybody’s got more important things in the world to worry about.” He said that two-thirds of the horses that come through his auction house need to be put down, so it isn’t merely a problem of prohibiting slaughter. There are a lot of horses out there which no one wants.

“Them animal rights people, they might have a good idea, but more people starve in Africa everyday than what they’re killing in horses, and nobody’s worrying about that,” Baker continued.

He added that he’s concerned about how the legal blocks to the slaughter trade are taking more jobs away from Americans, while the end result is the same: The horses are still getting slaughtered.

Tuscarawas County Humane Officer Dawn Smitley was at the auction Friday in hopes of buying some buckets at the tack auction which precedes the horse auction. Smitley noted that one of the controversies about the auction house was the poor condition of some of the animals.

“A lot of people want to blame Baker for what goes on here,” Smitley said, “but he doesn’t bring them in here like this.”

She said Baker has helped her by calling her and alerting her when he sees horses brought in that look abused. Smitley said she was neither for nor against the banning of the horse-slaughter trade, but she is concerned about how pending laws could be enforced after they are passed.

“Tuscarawas County is one of the biggest counties in the state,” Smitley said. “I’m just one humane officer.”

Smitley unexpectedly found herself on the job during Friday’s auction when she noticed the presence of a man who was on probation for cruelty to animals due to an incident where a horse he owned fell partially through the makeshift trailer it was being hauled in; it ended up having its foot dragged for five miles. Knowing the man was prohibited from buying a horse for five years, Smitley decided she would have to stay for the rest of the auction — which runs for up to five hours — to make sure he wasn’t buying a horse, and to call the police if he did.

In the past, many horses went from Sugarcreek to horse slaughterhouses in Illinois and Texas, which would kill and butcher the animals, sending the meat overseas. But in recent years, animal rights groups and horse lovers throughout the United States began protesting these operations and pushing for legislation to shut them down.

In 2005, an amendment was passed by Congress which attempted to shut the plants down by prohibiting any tax money to pay for USDA inspections of the plants. But the foreign-owned plants found a loophole by offering the USDA to pay for the inspections themselves, and thus remained in operation.

Taking matters into their own hands, Texas lawmakers passed a law in 2006 that banned horse slaughter completely in that state. While Illinois lawmakers were at work on similar legislation, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly reviewed the case and declared the USDA’s customer-paid-inspection arrangement illegal in March of this year. This effectively shut down the horse meat processing plants in the United States.

What it did not change, however, was the root cause for the plants in the first place.

There are two primary markets for horse meat: Japan and, perhaps surprisingly, western Europe. Japan is a country that has had relatively little experience with horses and thus has never developed the work/pet relationships that are so common in America. Therefore, horse meat is regarded by some Japanese as a rare delicacy, simply because of its rarity.

In Europe, there has recently been a strong upsurge of interest in horse meat as an alternative to beef due to the spread of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), more popularly known as “mad cow disease,” a fatal neurodegenerative disease which can be transferred to humans as Creuzfeldt-Jakob disease. According to the Humane Society of the United States, the main European consumers of horse meat are Belgium, France and Italy.

As BSE continues to loom, and the demand for horse meat continues to grow, the United States has become the primary source for horse meat, due to its large horse population and the number of horses being made available at auctions.

Since the courts effectively stopped all horse meat processing in the United States earlier this year, a new problem has arisen. Now horses are being bought, loaded onto tightly packed trailers and taken just over the border into Mexico to be slaughtered. The trip, taking 24 nonstop hours, provides no food, water nor comfort for the animals. Recent regulations have also attempted to outlaw the use of double-decker trailers for transport, which keep the horses from even being able to stand upright, but it is not clear that the resources exist to extensively enforce this law. The unintended consequence of the U.S. horse-slaughter ban is that horses are still being slaughtered, but now they are being slaughtered in a country with less stringent controls on how the horses are handled.

Previously in the United States, horses had to be rendered unconscious with a captive bolt gun, which fires a metal rod into the horse’s brain. The animal would then be hoisted by its rear leg and have its throat cut to drain the blood. While animal rights protesters have called this method cruel, reports from the Mexican slaughterhouses are far worse.

The Houston Chronicle’s Lisa Sandberg reported on Sept. 30 that she witnessed a slaughter at a processing facility in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico, where a horse was stabbed 10 times in the back with a knife until its spinal cord was severed. The animal then collapsed to the ground, where it remained for two minutes until the workers were able to hoist the animal and slit its throat. The horse was from a shipment of American horses.

In an attempt to completely block the horse slaughter trade in America, legislation has been introduced into Congress. The “Horse Slaughter Prevention Act” aims “to amend the Horse Protection Act to prohibit the shipping, transporting, moving, delivering, receiving, possessing, purchasing, selling, or donation of horse and other equines to be slaughtered for human consumption and other purposes.” But bill sponsor Rep. Charlie Gonzalez, D-Texas, has opined that Congress is so busy right now with other issues, such as the war in Iraq, that the attempt to shut down the slaughter trade will probably stall.

No easy solutions appear to be in the offing. Fear of disease is driving up horse meat consumption, while the restriction of horse slaughter in the United States has led to an increase in cruel conditions for the horses themselves. Furthermore, legislation which could ban the trade could have the unintentional effect of driving the value of horse meat up, leading to black market trade.