All horse slaughter closed down in Mexico and Canada today

Y'all don't take the meat because it protects your own farmers. The difference between US meat and organic meat is that organic costs more to produce and may be less healthy. Antibiotics are something I take when sick, so why shouldn't cattle and horses? I'd rather take my chances with the antibiotics than with germs.

There is no evidence that Americans are suffering disease and early death due to eating vast quantities of our 'tainted meat', nor that the Japanese are being poisoned by our products.

" Farmers with over 1000 head of sheep will have a passport for each and every one of them, same with cattle, Every horse in Europe should have one as well."

Not in the US, thankfully. My friend in Utah doesn't have a passport for each of his 2000 sheep & 400 cattle. He's hiring guys from Peru to tend the flocks because no American wants to herd the sheep. He & his sons speak limited Spanish, and trying to use sign language to explain "passports" would be interesting. And he runs cattle on land where there are less than two cows/sq mile. I'm not sure how anyone would check to see if sick cattle getting a shot were also getting it recorded in their "passports"! They are out grazing 100 miles from the closest vet.

Same with the horses. They live and work where there are no vets to come stamp their passports. The land below is closed now to grazing, but they used to run their sheep here:



You don't run into a lot of vets out there.

Nor is there any reason behind the passport system, other than to protect the high costs of meat in Europe. Y'all are not bigger or stronger or healthier based on our poisonous beef. No one in America eats horse meat, so we sure don't have to worry about that!

In America, we believe in freedom and free markets. In Europe, y'all believe in a system of government control and regulation that is repulsive to most Americans. We don't have helmets laws for our riders, or training requirements. We don't live in a place where you can't swing a dead cat without having it cross 3 national borders. We don't want to pay European prices for our food or gas or horses or houses or anything else.

Europe runs on a system that a lot of city dwellers in America approve of - a tightly regulated place. Unhappily, our cities in America often want to force that stuff on the rest of us, just like Europe does. I'm not telling y'all how to live, but I'm not interested in you telling ME how to live. So I think we ought to be looking at other markets. Asia and Africa aren't likely to complain about American beef, nor about American horsemeat.

How exactly does the passport work? Is there a paper record for each animal or a computer program/scanning system or what?
How are treatments recorded?
How does the passport physically stay with each animal?

What do you think is going to happen to all of the Standardbreds after the tracks have all closed?

All the harness tracks are closing? Please inform me. We live far away from any harness racing.

I think she means after this year's racing season is over, Cherie.

All I can speak of us horses, don't know exactly ho cattle works, only that it is supposed to be traceable from birth to butchershop shelve.

The passport, which is a binder with all info of the horse, markings, color, as recorded by a vet(a must), and an attachment with vaccines given, health certificates for travel and medical records.it has to stay with the horse, means the BO stores it, if the horse travels it has to be with the horse, ownership is recorded only on the ones issued by a registry, together with pedigree.
But, as I stated in my previous post, where there is a regulation there are two crooked ways to go around it.
Medications who can be only given by a vet can be had without prescription if you know the right people. I've seen it on every day bases in racing barns.

As for organic, farmers have five years to go from conventional to organic, all is super controlled. But I've seen established organic dairies, with their own shops at the farm, highly advertised, who have the semiloads of chemical fertilizers coming at night. . So much for how control works.

I also know for a fact, that pharmaceutical companies meet once a year in Brussels to set prices for all of Europe.
Example, dewormers....Equimax, here, about 10$, all over EU about 40$. Generic Ivermectin here 2.50, in EU about 20$. Vaccines, 3-way here about 5$, there 40$, and only available through a vet. Even Vetrap, here 1.40$, there 8-10$.
Why? Because it's all regulated.

I've lived with regulations for the first 54 years of my life and now hope that its not going in the same direction here.

As a beef producer,the biggest problem with importing US Beef is not the hormones an such administered to the cattle it is the factt aht European producers cannot raise cattle as cheaply and as massed produced as here in the US.
The US is to food what Saudie Arabia is to oil. We export more thatn any other country.
I have always found it strange that Europeans will no eat our beef but gladly will eat any horse meat that we will ship overseas. It is as much as concern about meat prices as about human health.
Farming in Europe is on a much smaller scale and is heavily subsidezed by the government.
There have been riots in France and Japan about the improtation of food because those countries cannot produce food as affordably as we can in North America.
Having lived in Eurpoe for 8 years I can attest that food prices there are higher than here in the US the farmers of other countries do not want competition. Shalom

Sorry double post

Example for subsidies : beef cattle. The EU gives money for every hectare(2,5acres) being used what they call extensive, opposed to intensive. Means, you can have one large animal unit, a cow older than two years or a horse older than 6 months per hectar of pasture. You can graze the land and get one cut of hay off of it. The EU gives you 200euros, about 280$, a year for doing it that way. Then they subsidise the cattle coming off of it too, young bull premiom, slaughter premium and a few more. So, a farmer with 70 ha will receive a nice check once a year, even if he does next to nothing. My neighbor in Germany milked that system to the max. He kept his cattle on drylot, and made hay off his land and sold it.
Farmers in the EU are basically working welfare recipients.
What it does for horsefolks, I bet you all can imagine. Try to rent a pasture....unaffordable! Because the farmer gets more money for it from the EU.

Desert horsewoman, not sure where the heck you got your wormers from but I've never paid any more than £12 for mine, and I've never paid more than 50p for vetwrap. You were getting conned where ever you were. My most recent set of vaccines (flu and tet as they are the only ones we need in the UK) £50 including vet call out and the horses annual MOT (not needed but something I do for my peace of mind)


For cattle (and I worked in the beef industry for a while at the biggest processor of beef in the UK) the passports are semi electronic. The paper version of the passport acompanies the animal, but the system is worked on a series of barcodes and scanning. Every movement of the animal is tracked and all the drugs administered to it.

BSMS, whilst you may take antibiotics when you are ill, Cattle in the US are given them constantly to prevent them becoming ill in the first place, this leads to drug resistance. Also whilst the antibiotics have been approved for cattle and are safe for cattle they may not be safe for humans even at trace levels. There are some that have never been tested on humans before.

The western world now has record amounts of allergies, birth defomities, cancers, learning difficulties, drug resistance as well as many many hormonal diseases (PCOS being one of them), there is significant evidence that this may be caused by the hormones and chemicals in our food. Whilst the proof is not yet conclusive the evidence is pretty damning.