Public Records Of Horses Slaughtered At Beltex

Valentine's Day for USESR founder, Antoinette Smith, was spent at the Tarrant County Courthouse delving through recent public filings by Fort Worth slaughterhouse, Beltex. Thanks to a lawsuit brought about by the Tarrant County D.A.'s office in an attempt to enforce old Texas laws against slaughtering horses for human consumption, both Texas slaughterhouses are now filing public records, a practice ignored by them and County officials since the law was passed. Now, for the first time, anyone can go to the County Courthouses (Kauffman or Tarrant) and see these records for themselves.

Getting copies of these records at Tarrant County is going to be pretty pricey ($1.00 per page), and each report is approximately 90 pages long, including the little yellow slips of paper that are filled out when each shipment is brought in. Antoinette transposed as much as she could, until writers cramp took over. If you go, be prepared to pay to park because most parking meters only go up to two hours, and you may need longer if you intend to transpose very much documentation.

Antoinette found two issues she was concerned about. First, no Mustang brands were recorded. Only the word, "Mustang" was written in the field where brands were drawn. Second, any horse not easily identifiable as one of the pre-written breeds on the form was labeled a Quarter Horse, even when the horse was described as a pony.

There were two sets of paperwork. The first were little yellow papers that were the size of the pad a waitress might take down your food order on at a cafe`. These contained the name of the shipper and had blanks at the bottom for bruised, crippled, and dead horses. These blanks were never filled in, although there were some hand-written notes along the side that sort of told what was what. For instance, one noted that two horses were bad, but didn't specify whether or not they were dead or crippled, but the shipper only got credit for the ones that weren't either dead or crippled, and this was also reflected on the little yellow paper, out to the side.

The second set of papers filed were the Texas Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association Horse Inspection Forms. Scanned in copy of one of these forms. As you can see, these forms aren't all that easy to understand, either. The problem seems to be some sort of shorthand in the "Brands" column. Line #4 has an example of this. There is a drawing of what appears to be a brand, plus some sort of lettering that appears to be "lh". Other pages contained other 3-letter abbreviations, as well as some which had numbers in front of or after the drawing of the brands. Transcript of Antoinette's notes from several of these Horse Inspection Forms.