Opinion | When summer camp is over, ask about the horses

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Amid the pines and birches, they walk dutifully on the trail or trot nose to tail in a ring. There are blacks and bays, pintos and grays: Thunder, Chief, Ranger, Belle, Beauty, Skipper, Midnight, Bud and Goldie. There’s usually a Hank and a Fred. Sometimes a Diablo. I remember a Schimmel.

A child’s first crush — usually a girl child’s — is often the camp horse.

Good camp horses and ponies are babysitters with four legs, beloved by children who learn heads up, heels down, lower your hands, don’t grab the horn. Each summer, fortunate American kids take their first risks and get their first big thrills atop the back of trusty geldings and mares at Camp Lake Widji-Goomi-Wahoo.

From Maine to California, America’s more than 15,000 summer camps (according to the American Camp Association) offer varying degrees of rustic-ness and sports. Many camps, even day camps, offer riding.

I adored camp — Sailing! Riflery! Archery! Horses! — and spent a couple of summer sessions as a pre-teen falling in love with all the horses, from the Belgian draft team that pulled a wagon to the feisty ponies, which hurt a lot less when they stepped on your foot.

These days, when autumn arrives, with the rising price of land, feed, insurance, veterinary and farrier care, and with the increasing shortage of farm workers, what happens to the dear camp horses?

Around Labor Day, while the glossy, high-stepping draft horse hitches pound around the hippodrome at the Minnesota State Fair, cheered by thousands of onlookers, thousands of camp horses enter an almost invisible pipeline that runs from summer camps to auctions to slaughter buyer trucks to slaughter houses in Mexico or Canada.

Although some camp horses are scooped up by appreciative families and individual riders, the kill buyers, the “meat men,” get great deals. Their semis wait behind the auction barns where bewildered horses with bidding numbers stuck to their hips are led in or shooed into the ring loose. They are quickly taken away by bidders from big buyers such as Kaufman, Stanley Bros., Rotz, Fabrizius and O’Dwyer.

Then they make the 18-hour — and documented up to 35-hour — truck ride (standing without food, water or rest) to the unregulated Mexican slaughter plant (nearly 117,997 U.S. horses in 2023) or the Belgian-owned Bouvry plant (2,344 sent in 2023) in Canada. Their meat goes to Asia, South America, Russia and parts of Europe, where people consider horse meat a delicacy.

Camp horses are only part of the mix: race horses, Amish work horses, companion horses, backyard horses, show horses and more are processed. Never mind the de-wormer, painkillers and antibiotics likely circulating in the bloodstream. European customers, wise to these hazards, mandate a six-month stay for U.S. horses in a feedlot before slaughter. The feedlots are bleak, the horses unsheltered.