Saddles, not slaughter

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This article was published 10/06/2022 (1593 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Part way through each of her live shows, Canadian Music Hall of Fame inductee Jann Arden stops singing.

A large photo of her wearing a shirt with the hashtag #Horseshit on it appears on the screen behind her, and she says to the crowd: “You’re just going to have to sit back and listen to my mini-rant about something I’m really passionate about.”

The singer, songwriter, author and actor, who performed two shows earlier this week at the Club Regent Event Centre as part of a cross-country tour, then spends several minutes enlightening audiences about Canada’s live horse export industry.

The industry — which sent more than 1,900 horses from airports in Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary last year, on flights of up to 28 hours, to be slaughtered for sashimi in Japan — is a cruel and unethical blight on Canadian agriculture, Arden says. And she won’t stop talking about until it ends.

For the last few years, Arden has lent her powerful voice to raising awareness about the live export of horses from Canada, along with The Canadian Horse Defense Coalition advocacy group. Thanks in part to their #Horseshit campaign, banning the exportation of live horses for slaughter was added to the Liberal platform ahead of last fall’s federal election.

“(Prime Minister Justin) Trudeau stepped up, said ‘We want to stop this,’ and we were all cheering for two weeks,” Arden recalls. “But here we are almost a year later and nothing has been done.”

So the fight for Arden and her fellow horse advocates continues, to both showcase the largely unknown business of live horse export from Canada, and to remind governments that it has already been mandated to end. She uses her concerts as a way to keep spreading the message.

“I talk about these horses being raised in feedlots,” she says, speaking to audiences about the treatment of the draft and draft-cross horses as meat-animals.

She speaks of the gruelling travel conditions, the long ground transport to city airports and the hours the horses spend crated on tarmacs. “Winnipeg is constantly known for having some of the coldest weather in the country and these horses are often standing in these crates on the tarmac for hours,” she says in an interview Monday a few hours before her Club Regent show.

Then upon arrival in Japan, she says, after being forced to stand in place, crated for the entirety of the flight and without any veterinary care, some horses have arrived injured or dead.

For Arden, born and raised in Alberta, the specific focus on horses comes from a deep-seated anger about the mistreatment of animals she says have done so much for humanity.

“It’s the history of the horse, how they have travelled us to every corner of the world, pulled our wagons, fought our wars, plowed our fields, pulled our logs” she says, “and the contradictory polarization of taking these very same horses now, and completely taking away their worth, taking away the pride of what it means to be a horseman.”

She adds that a cowboy’s most important creed is “You never eat your horse.”

Animal welfare has long been an important issue for Arden, who began reducing her own consumption of animal products nearly two decades ago, and eventually becoming vegan.

She says Canada is lagging behind other G7 countries when it comes to farmed animal care, citing high transport time limits, the continued use of gestation crates in pig farming and what have come to be known as “ag-gag laws” recently enacted in some provinces “that are choking us off,” she says.

In recent years, Manitoba, Ontario, Alberta and Prince Edward Island have enacted legislation, which is often described as “ag-gag laws”, to in-part deter whistleblowers, activists and journalists from gaining access to farms to gather and share evidence of animal mistreatment.

“Apathy is where animal welfare ends and too many Canadians are willing to put blindfolds on and not care about where their food comes from,” she adds.

These animal welfare issues, along with the live export of horses for slaughter are making the rest of Canadian agriculture look bad, says Arden, “and you’re only as good as the worst guy in your band.”

But when she takes those moments to speak to audiences about her cause, Arden says she is always greeted by cheers, and is happy to often sees a speckling of #Horseshit shirts among the crowd. This gives her hope that things will change.

The Winnipeg Humane Society and Animal Justice are hosting an International Day to End Horse Exportation rally on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislative building Saturday, June 11, from 12-3 p.m.