SASKATOON – John Jones can remember it clearly. It was a beautiful spring day when he showed two undercover animal rights activists, disguised as American horse buyers, around his farm.
Now he regrets that he didn’t follow his instincts. When the auction market called to tell him the pair wanted to visit his pregnant mare’s urine farm, he said jokingly: “I hope they’re not those animal rights activists.
“They talked a pretty good story for a while,” said Jones, who spoke on condition his real name not be used.
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But during the tour he began to suspect they weren’t horse buyers.
Later Jones confirmed they were from the U.S.- based animal rights organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
After putting it down to a mistake, he forgot about it until last week when the British newspaper, the Sunday Times, reported that PETA claimed to have uncovered evidence of abuse of some 75,000 mares on PMU farms in Canada and the United States.
Jones wasn’t worried. Everything had looked fine on his farm, except for one colt with a bad cut.
Margaret Lawson was one of the women who went undercover on 18 PMU farms, including Jones’ operation.
“I saw neglect of horses on every single farm,” Lawson told The Western Producer in an interview from Washington.
“The conditions of the barns and the stalls were filthy and appalling. I saw a variety of wounds on the horses that were left completely untreated. I saw a callous disregard for the animals’ welfare.
“Wounds were left untreated on (John Jones’) farm. There was a horse there that was cut down to the bone. It was festering, oozing. It had been that way for quite a while and he was waiting to see how it would do on its own.
“He (Jones) had no concern at all that the horse’s bone was hanging out of the horse’s leg,” said Lawson.
Remarks like that make Jones angry.
“When you live in a farming community, you’re an open person. If someone comes and talks about horses, I’ll drop everything. I feel like I’ve been raped.”
But still Jones isn’t ready to fight back. He doesn’t want his Manitoba hometown mentioned, fearing negative publicity will cloud his business whether the accusations are true or not.
He maintains he looked after the colt’s sore leg. He said he had faithfully soaked the wound and bandaged the leg twice a day for two months, but it was still a nasty cut when the women arrived.
That’s the way PETA and other animal rights organizations work, said Montreal author Alan Herscovici, who wrote the book Second Nature: The Animal Rights Controversy.
Farmers must remember PETA’s goal isn’t to stop cases of animal abuse. They want to stop any use of animals by people, Herscovici said.
Organizations like PETA will continue to send out negative messages about the PMU industry, he said.
Without some counter campaign by those in the business, people will begin to believe the horror stories.
“They count on people to bury their head in the sand and not react, or react in a red-neck way,” said Herscovici.
