COMMODIFYING THE DEAD HORSE- NEW YORK

Officers examining sick animals 

In death the horse became a commodity as well. When horses became sick, lame, or just too old to justify the money spent in feeding and stabling them, their owners had them shot. It is likely that relatively few animals died directly from natural causes, although some did drop dead on city streets or in the stable. Owners insured horses, a major capital investment, but insurance companies were reluctant to let owners shoot their own horses, since the temptation to make an insurance claim when business was slow might prove too much for some owners. Veterinarians, police officers, and agents of anti-cruelty groups could shoot horses, however, if they deemed the animals diseased, dangerous, or incapable of further work. This would validate an insurance claim. Between 1887 and 1897, New York’s ASPCA, the city’s leading killer of animals, shot between eighteen hundred and seven thousand horses a year. (This is the beginning of the familiar paradox by which humane societies have become the leading killers of animals in cities.) Vets accepted animal owners’ valuation of animals almost exclusively from their productive utility. As usual, New York had the most massive problem. Seven to eight thousand horses a year died in Manhattan in the early 1880s, compared with only fifteen hundred a year in Chicago. As many as thirty-six died on Manhattan streets daily during the Great Epizootic in 1872. One writer has estimated that twenty-five hundred horses died in New York during the epizootic, although this figure is much higher than anything that we can glean from contemporary reports. In 1910, probably the peak year, the municipality reported the removal from its streets of more than 20,595 dead horses.
Marketplace considerations dictated prompt removal, since decomposition could ruin many by-products. Stable owners had contracts with rendering plants for the removal of dead animals. City governments also had contracts with rendering firms to remove dead horses from the streets. In New York City, for example, the New York Rendering Company, which had a monopoly on public and private rendering, guaranteed to the Board of Health removal within three hours. The municipality was not alone in wanting rapid removal. After rigor mortis set in, hides lost their value, so speedy pickup was also important to the company, which made the highly improbable claim that it removed most animals in fifteen minutes. Health or police officers notified the firm of dead animals via the city’s new police telegraph system. We have not seen any complaints about slow removal in Health Department Reports or in New York newspapers, probably because the interests of the rendering firm and of the Health Department coincided.
The picture of a dead horse in a gutter that frequently appears in American history textbooks shows an anomaly. Carcasses traveled on special wagons with ramps that tilted down to the street. A horse-powered winch pulled a cable that hauled the dead animal up onto the wagon’s bed. A tarpaulin covered the dead horse en route. Other municipalities had removal systems like that of New York. This process differed widely from that in those countries of continental Europe where consuming horsemeat (hippophagy) was commonplace.

In Paris, owners seldom killed horses, since the authorities forbade processing dead or diseased horses into human food. Rather the horses were driven to the slaughterhouse, some limping along on three legs. Owners usually shaved the horses before getting rid of them, preferring to sell the hair themselves rather than letting the slaughterhouses benefit from this valuable by-product. The Parisian public found these pathetic parades of bald horses very offensive.
Most Americans followed the British folkway of not consuming horsemeat, so they did not process horses in the Parisian manner. There were some American intellectuals who advocated hippophagy, notably Henry Bergh, founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Bergh believed that death in a slaughterhouse was preferable to death under some peddler’s whip. This was a most exotic position—he advocated the consumption of horsemeat not for the benefit of human populations but for the horses themselves, a kind of euthanasia. The first dean of the University of Pennsylvania Veterinary School served the unidentified remains of Dora, his pet horse, to his colleagues at a formal dinner just to show that the opposition to hippophagy was purely cultural. The prominent veterinarian John S. Billings argued that horsemeat was healthy, that aversion to it was based on “ignorant customs,” and that many urban horses were more suited “for food than work.”
Some American humans did eat horsemeat, mostly in city neighborhoods populated by immigrants who had eaten it in the old country. Clay McShane can remember “pork shops” in German neighborhoods in New York City in the 1950s, which sold horsemeat. Evidently, consumption of the meat increased during World War II rationing. There were earlier examples. During the siege of Vicksburg, mule steaks commanded twenty dollars apiece, and other soldiers consumed horsemeat at various times during the Civil War.
The variety of products made from dead animals was remarkable. Rendering plants shaved the hair to be used for cushions, “thus the dead are made to minister to the comfort of the living.” Hair also became a stickener for plaster and was made into blankets. Skinners cut the hide off, using the rump portion of the hide for highly valued cordovan leather. They boiled hooves to extract oil, especially for glue but also for gelatin. Renderers boiled the carcass in a pressure boiler to separate flesh from bones and then carved the leg bones into knife handles and combs. The ribs and head were treated to remove oils and then burned for bootblack, a substance valued not just for polish but also for filters in sugar refineries.
Vapors from this process became the chief source of carbonate of ammonia and a valuable insecticide. The phosphate of lime extracted from bones was processed into phosphorus for matches. Horsemeat became pet food. The remaining mass was pounded with potash to produce prussiate of potash, which was needed for dyes and poisons. Fats skimmed o¤ the top of the vat became soap or candles. One St. Louis rendering firm in 1896 claimed a twenty-four-dollar profit on each carcass.
Before the beginnings of modern processing, all but the hide and fat was cut up, perhaps baked, and then hauled to the country to be dumped on fields as a fertilizer. By the 1820s it was common to apply this meat, and especially dried blood and ground bones, as fertilizers. The pioneering 1840 research of the German chemist Justus von Liebig demonstrated the value of this folk custom, especially for the latter two items. In 1851 D.J. Browne’s American Muck Book suggested that the nitrogen-rich remnants of soap making should be applied at a rate of two hundred pounds to the acre. In spite of the possibilities of recycling, however, as late as 1880, Charleston, South Carolina, was still dumping dead animals on the ground outside the city, while Albany, New York, was throwing them into the Hudson River.
The new rendering factories associated with large slaughterhouses starting in the 1850s processed carcasses from not only horses but also hogs and steers. Dr. R. W. L. Rasin, the Baltimore chemist of one of the phosphate fertilizer firms, began experimenting with mixing the rendered slaughterhouse wastes (or, more properly, the “soup” left after the fat had been skimmed) with rock phosphate, thereby increasing the nitrogen content of the fertilizer. By 1868 he was buying tanks of slaughterhouse wastes from the huge Chicago meat packer Armour & Company, wastes previously dumped into sewers. In 1871 a New York rendering firm sold eighty-three tons of soupy wastes for $38.21 a ton. Only the giant new slaughterhouses or, in Boston’s case, abattoir (i.e., public slaughterhouses on the European model) had the economies of scale to fully recycle dead animals.
Rendering was a process that reeked horribly. It raised all of the NIMBY problems that manure pits did. The New York Times described the air around one plant as “poisonous.” Even in the colonial period, blood boiling, candle making, and soap manufacturing had been regulated as noxious trades, usually by forcing them to the outskirts of town. This was much harder to do with the huge meatprocessing plants that appeared in the 1860s. Firms processed wastes in giant boilers, sometimes outdoors, since they did not like the cost of closed boilers (autoclaves) and feared explosions. A local nuisance could become citywide.

On July 21, 1873, the John P. Squire Company slaughterhouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a very large stink from rendering late at night, causing residents from Radcliffe College to Boston’s South End (a distance of five miles) to wake up nauseous and to vomit. Ironically, conditions were worse that night because Squire’s had made a mistake while trying newly required pollution control equipment. Some relief came with the imposition of more e¤ective health regulations in the 1870s, most notably requirements that rendering take place indoors in autoclaves, not vats. The development of air pollution control devices, which passed exhaust through superheated steam consuming much of the residue, reduced a sometimes-citywide stink to a neighborhood aroma. The areas around such plants typically became neighborhoods for poor, working-class residents probably willing to trade good air for slaughterhouse jobs.

See the Portuguese version:
MERCANTILIZAÇÃO DO CAVALO MORTO EM NOVA YORK

By Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr in the book 'The Horse in the City' - Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century, The Johns Hopkins University Press, U.S.A, 2007, p.27-30. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.