Animals: Horse Slaughter

Ten thousand bedraggled horses last week limped in herds through the San Carlos Indian reservation, an arid section of Arizona. They searched for water but found death. No one owned them, or wanted to own them. They were scrawny, bigheaded beasts, physically degenerate. Practically every one of the 10,000 was infected with dourine.

Dourine is a genital disease peculiar only to horses. It swells their groins and eventually paralyzes their hind quarters. The cause of the disease is a trypanosome, brother of the trypanosome which causes human sleeping sickness and distant relative of Treponema pallidum which causes syphilis. Dourine is highly contagious and spreads rapidly among unstalled horses. Arizona fears the spread of the disease among her domesticated herds.

Hence last week a vast, leisurely round-up of the diseased San Carlos strays was under way. Every water hole on the reservation had been fenced in. Sick, thirsty herds limped from one enclosure to another, found some where they could enter and drink. Their refreshment was their death. Men were there to kill every one. to ship them to factories where the hides would be salvaged, the carcasses milled into plant-nutrifying meal, the hooves made into glue.