by Spence Cooper on 01/06/10 at 9:00 am
These are not your mom's Butchers
A black market for animal flesh has plagued rural West Miami-Dade in Florida for decades, where horse flesh, pigs, chickens, goats and other animals in these filthy, unregulated and illegal markets are sold to individuals and restaurant owners looking for bargain basement prices. Animals are also sold on these black markets to people who use them in Santeria rituals.
Richard Couto, a former investigator with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in South Florida was so troubled and disturbed by the inhumane treatment of animals (many which are butchered while still in their death throes), and the look-the-other-way apathy on behalf of city and county officials, he left the SPCA to form his own group, Animal Recovery Mission.
For Couto, the defining moment came when he rescued a race horse named Freedom’s Flight — whose bloodlines can be traced to Seattle Slew and Secretariat — from an illegal slaughter farm in Miami-Dade County; after Freedom’s Flight’s leg snapped at Miami’s Gulfstream race track, the horse was sold for slaughter for the measly sum of fifty dollars.
“Prior to his rescue, I didn’t know that illegal slaughter farms existed in the country — let alone under my nose in my own county,” says Couto. “It really made me buckle down and basically dedicate my life to shut this industry down. It’s become personal for me,” he says.
Couto believes there are over one hundred illegal slaughterhouses in the unincorporated areas of Miami-Dade country where only one slaughterhouse operates legally. Crude English and Spanish signs advertise the sale of these animals on dirt roads leading to trailer parks, small farms, and ranches along the flange of the Everglades. Most of the illegal setups are owned or operated by immigrants from other countries.
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist after walking the properties and seeing the dead carcasses, the guts in the trash bins, the slaughter tables, the knives — all of the tools of running this type of operation is right in front of you,” says Couto, who told CNN reporters that it isn’t the slaughtering of animals that has put him on this mission. It’s the way the animals are treated. “These animals are living in extreme filth. They’re beaten. The way they’re slaughtered is inhumane.”
“These illegal slaughter farms have been running for north of 20 to 30 years without anyone doing anything about it,” Couto told The Miami Herald. Couto has championed his efforts by spearheading his own one-man investigation. He goes into the slaughterhouses acting like a customer armed with a video camera, and has taped or photographed “pools of blood and waste seeping into open ground; entrails stacked on butcher tables; a fly-covered, decapitated baby goat.”
“I go in acting like a customer,” he says, “I ask them, ‘How much for the pig?’ And they’ll say 120 dollars. ‘How much for the kill?’ ’20 bucks. We’ll slaughter it for you for 20 bucks.’ It’s that easy.” He told CNN he’s taken his story and videos and attempted to set up a task force with agencies in charge animal cruelty, illegal structures, illegal businesses, permit problems and zoning issues, but Couto says nothing came of it. His efforts are met with indifference and bureaucratic doublespeak. The Miami Herald reports county police, prosecutors and other county agencies contend that laws aren’t specific enough to justify prosecution, and unlicensed slaughterhouses fall between the proverbial USDA regulatory cracks.
The abject indifference to animal cruelty and flagrant disregard for the safety of consumers by Florida officials immobilized by bureaucratic complexity is aptly epitomized by a comment from Carlos Espinosa, director of the Miami-Dade Department of Environmental Resource Management. “Our work is focused on wetlands and incidental environmental issues. The mere fact of having pigs on your property is not a violation.”
Similar illustrations of government catatonia are echoed by Miami-Dade Detective Edna Hernandez, who claims only horse meat is illegal to sell commercially and that cases in the unlicensed slaughter of other livestock aren’t being pursued. “We’re not participating in these investigations because we found the most effective way to combat this is with code compliance and animal services.”
With an alarming number of state, county, and city agencies facing critical budget shortfalls this year, the prevention of animal cruelty from the ravages of these wretched slaughterhouses are sure to be last on the list of priorities. God Bless the heroic efforts of men like Richard Couto. But animal cruelty is only part of the problem: these illegal slaughterhouses breach a host of health code violations that put consumers at risk of deadly diseases like E. coli and salmonella. Food poisoning problems among meat producers is already so widespread the USDA can’t even adequately control contamination from “legitimate” meat producers.
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