Texas – The Fort Worth Star Telegram carried a story on April 18, 2001 by Angela K. Brown about the theft of horses for sale to slaughter houses:

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) - They were hated fixtures of the Wild West. The nemeses of lawmen, ranchers and lonesome cowboys on long cattle drives.

Decades later, horse thieves are still causing problems in Texas, where the equine industry is now the second largest in the state, behind cattle ranching, and worth $11 billion.

"The problem is, they used to hang them. Now they don't," said John South, an agriculture extension agent in Tarrant County.

Of the more than 1 million horses worth $4.2 billion in Texas, about 200 are reported stolen each year, and about 50 percent to 75 percent are recovered, according to the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association.

Some experts say the horse theft problem has increased because of growing demand for horse meat abroad, spurred by concerns about foot-and-mouth disease and mad cow disease in Europe.

Bans imposed by nations around the world because of those ailments have halted 94 percent of the European Union's beef exports and 73 percent of its pork exports. They also have slowed Europe's weekly livestock slaughter from a half million head to just 350,000 head, according to Hidenet.com, an Internet market report.

Horse prices in the United States have jumped from a high of $50 per hundredweight to as high as $80 per hundredweight for some animals in the past several weeks, likely because of the situation in Europe, said Jody Henderson, who manages the TSCRA's horse identification program.

But people steal horses, regardless of market prices, because they view it as easy money, some industry experts say.

"It's been going on a long time, mostly in rural areas because they're easy to load and dispose of," said Steve Westbrook, executive director of the Sheriffs Association of Texas. "Sometimes, the owner lives in the city away from where the horses are kept."

Several groups in the state are cracking down on horse theft with new educational programs for ranchers, slaughterhouses and law enforcement agencies.

The TSCRA, a Fort Worth-based trade organization founded in 1877, has inspectors at the state's two horse slaughterhouses, Beltex in Fort Worth and Dallas Crown in Kaufman.

Last year the 35,600 horses at those facilities were checked for brands, embedded electronic chips or other identifying marks to make sure the animals weren't stolen.

The association also is expanding the database for its horse identification program so more information, including a picture, can be listed about each animal.

"Horses have such a big economic impact in Texas, so it's a big deal when one gets stolen," said Susan Wagner, managing editor of The Cattleman magazine. "Some are worth $5,000 to $10,000, but they're stolen and sold to processing houses for very little money."

Industry officials say owners are not just concerned with money when a horse is stolen.

"For a lot of these people, it started out as a 4-H project with their child, and it grew into having the horses for pleasure riding and just pets," said La Donna Wilkinson, director of registration for the Amarillo-based American Quarter Horse Association. "They get so close to the animals, if it's stolen it feels like a part of the family is gone."

On the Net: http://texascattleraisers.org