In 1998, nearly 60 percent of California’s voters supported Proposition 6. The resulting Section 598c of our Penal Code declares that: “It is unlawful for any person to possess, to import into or export from the state, or to sell, buy, give away, hold or accept any horse with the intent of killing, or having another kill, that horse, if that person knows or should have known that any part of that horse will be used for human consumption.”1
Those violating Section 598c commit a felony. If successfully prosecuted, they may face two to three years’ incarceration. This is what the voters wanted. Yet, as I have learned over the past few months, neither the criminal investigation nor the judicial branches of California’s legal system have seemingly ever enforced Section 598c.
One of the central goals of Proposition 6 was to protect horses and their owners from theft and fraud by perpetrators who quickly “sell on” the stolen horses for slaughter at a profit. I may now be, unhappily, a member of an ever growing club of people that have suffered this form of horse fraud in California. I don’t actually know that I am. I don’t know because I cannot induce law enforcement agencies to investigate my case.
In March of 2007, I entrusted one of my Thoroughbred mares, a healthy and sound former racehorse and broodmare whom I figured had more than earned herself a chance at a third career, into the ownership of a local woman. Indeed, a California Horse Racing Board (CHRB) licensed owner of Thoroughbred racehorses.
Although I did not know the woman personally, she was recommended to me as a provider of a good home for my horse by a “friend.” As it turns out, both women deliberately misled me, regarding the horse’s intended usage, in order to extract the animal from me for free, and to sell her very shortly afterwards for a “killer” price. They told me my mare would be retrained as a lesson horse.
I am now unable to locate my horse. Neither I, nor the lawyer I retained for two (expensive and completely unproductive) hours, are able to induce the women involved to tell me where my horse mysteriously “disappeared” to. I am unable to persuade either my local police, or the District Attorney’s office in Riverside County, to investigate. And, in a nice catch 22, the CHRB will discipline its licensee only if I can obtain a legal ruling in my favor.
But in searching for my horse, without the aid of any office of the law, I have learned a great deal about the enforcement of California’s Prohibition of Horse Slaughter Act. I have attended the local low-end horse auctions in Mira Loma (“Mike’s Horse And Tack Sale”) and Chino (the “Euclid Stockyard” horse sale) where kill buyers still regularly purchase large numbers of horses for shipment either “straight” to slaughter, or to other low-end horse sales and feedlots out of state.

Going, Going…Gone
Attending these auctions is not my favorite pastime. Many of the horses there are malnourished, and sometimes outright neglected and abused. However, the auctions are attended by some wonderful folk, who “rescue” the horses at low market prices, and take them home for costly rehabilitation, and sometimes for the humane euthanasia which the horses’ original owners were unwilling to provide, or - and I’m being generous here - unable to afford.
At the auctions, I also see the racing industry’s throwaway Thoroughbreds, aluminum race plates still attached to their hooves. These are horses shipped to auction by CHRB licensed trainers, often acting as agents for CHRB licensed owners, when they are no longer useful - perhaps because they sustained a minor injury that did not “warrant” humane euthanasia at the racetrack, or perhaps because they simply weren’t fast enough to race profitably.
These Thoroughbreds are among the 92 percent of horses slaughtered for human consumption, according to USDA estimates, that are perfectly healthy. For not much money and effort, they could be retrained for second careers, and there are some excellent Thoroughbred retirement and adoption farms in California that specialize in providing exactly this service. Seemingly, however, there’s a whole bunch of CHRB licensees who simply can’t do without the 20 to 40 dollars per hundred weight that they obtain from the kill buyers. I wonder if the CHRB cares that every time its licensees drop a horse into these auctions, and receive a check from the killer buyer, a felony is committed?
Unfortunately, it was impossible for me to view directly the sale records of these auctions to determine whether my horse had ever been exchanged through one of them. I was informed that no records of the individual horses sold in Mira Loma, for example, are ever kept, and that records of sellers’ names are not maintained beyond a couple of months.
I wonder why? Low-end auctions are an essential ingredient of the horse industry, bringing together sellers who no longer have a use for their horse, and buyers who do. They also feed the horse slaughter industry.
I also scoured the better known and heavily populated horse “feedlots” in Riverside and Los Angeles Counties, feedlots that are clearly visible from public highways. How did I know what, and where, the feedlots were? Because a local rescue regularly purchases horses from feedlots “just in time” - before the feedlot owners sell the horses to their regular kill buyers for out-of-state shipment. The local rescue told me where to look.
I posted my horse’s details on Internet sites devoted to finding “lost” and stolen horses. If you don’t believe that horse theft and fraud are frequent occurrences, I invite you to check out the hundreds, maybe thousands, of listings at www.netposse.com. I occasionally receive e-mail responses from these sites, telling me that someone has rescued a horse from a killer sale in California, a horse that answers to my mare’s description. They are not her, but I am happy that similar mares have found good homes.

No Enforcement
I have often wondered why there is no enforcement of Section 598c at the auctions and feedlots that supply horses to slaughter. There is no doubt that Section 598c is routinely violated by sellers, buyers, feedlot owners and the auction houses themselves. My guess is that if the peace, humane society, and animal control officers that are identified elsewhere in California’s penal code as responsible for enforcement of the relevant sections of the law had made even random appearances at the low-end auctions since 1998, “feel good” Proposition 6 might have stood a fighting chance of actually being enforced as law (not to mention that sellers might have been forcibly educated in what constitutes adequate horse care).
It is also interesting to me that public auctions are not required by law to maintain or publish sale records. Such a requirement might help eradicate fraudulent sales, or at least mitigate their consequences for former owners, like myself, attempting to locate their horse. Notably, if I buy a horse at a premier Thoroughbred auction in California, the very first condition of sale constitutes the text of Section 598c. Yet nowhere, at the low-end auctions, is there any public recognition of this law. Would it have been so costly to require all horse auctions to publish the text of the law as a condition of sale? And how much accountability for the legality of the business that they conduct could have been imposed that way upon the auction houses? I am also puzzled that law enforcement agencies cannot monitor known “feedlots” for violations of Section 598c. I certainly have. It’s not tough to figure out the frequency with which groups of horses mysteriously “disappear” into the night from them.
Perhaps, somehow, officers of the peace are less well-equipped than private individuals and non-profit rescues to distinguish between the legitimate – read “legal” - transactions at auctions and feedlots, with non kill buyers, and the illegitimate – read “illegal” - transactions conducted with the meat men? I don’t know anyone involved in horse rescue that frequents low-end horse auctions and feedlots that has not managed somehow to figure out this distinction - or even identify exactly the parties involved in the illegal transactions.
So what’s the excuse? Reportedly, District Attorneys across California argue that there were no funds appropriated for enforcement of Section 598c. Yet independent estimates developed, in 1998, of the fiscal consequences of enforcement of Section 598c were small. Why couldn’t a small part of the aggregate law enforcement budget simply be allocated to enforcing Section 598c? Presumably, the voters believed that it would be so.
District Attorneys also reportedly argue that the inter-county, and inter-state nature of transportation of horses for slaughter renders enforcement infeasible. Yet, the USDA was able to report very precisely the numbers of horses exported from California to slaughter plants elsewhere in the United States prior to the vote on Proposition 6. How did government monitoring of horse transportation to slaughter mysteriously became impossible after the voters supported Proposition 6? Couldn’t the USDA inspectors working in the foreign owned slaughter plants have helped ensure that no California horses were slaughtered illegally after 1998?
And why haven’t professional horse associations, especially those with state funding such as the CHRB, self-regulated to ensure their members are not committing felony crimes? Couldn’t the CHRB monitor the post-racing outcomes of the horses with whose welfare they are entrusted? Of course they could. It’s just not a priority. Are there social costs of non-enforcement? I’m the wrong person to ask! But I do wonder how many dollars have been spent by private individuals and non-profit rescues since 1998 to purchase horses away from kill buyers at the auctions and feedlots. These people have borne the burden of enforcement which voters placed squarely, in 1998, upon the State.
California’s horses continue to be shipped to slaughter thousands of miles away. Worse, now that the European owned slaughter plants in this country have been closed by state laws, our horses are being exported en mass to Mexico. In Mexico, even the loosely enforced U.S. laws pertaining to the humane shipment and treatment of horses for slaughter are null. There, they slaughter horses by stabbing them in the neck to sever their spinal cords, rendering the horses immobile, but not necessarily insensible, while they are hung, their throats slit, and they are bled out.
Maybe writing this article will be cathartic. Nothing else has been. We used to hang our horse thieves. Now we choose to hang our horses. But, in the state of California, it’s illegal, don’t you know?
Author Caroline Betts is a recreational rider who lives and keeps horses in Norco.

1 Almost all of the literally millions of horses slaughtered and processed in this country since 1986 have been exported for human consumption in Europe and Asia. A tiny fraction of the horsemeat produced in the United States is used as feed for big cats in zoos.