Louisiana Sale To Consider New Minimum Bids After Horses Go From Auction Ring To Self-Professed Bail Pen
Oct 7, 2024
Thoroughbred welfare watchdogs reacted with outrage on social media last week after a group of horses sold at the Sept. 27 Breeders Sales of Louisiana auction showed up on a Facebook page that claimed they are at risk of shipping to slaughter.
The page listed seven horses – five yearlings and two broodmares – for sale on Oct. 3 with the note “owned by the kill buyer.” A representative for the page declined to identify the owner, but said the page works with “a couple of dealers that send horses” and that they “don’t pass out names due to too much craziness on social media.”
Each horse’s ad included a photo of their sale catalogue page.
All seven horses, plus four more, were sold to a Steve Nalls four days earlier at the Louisiana Thoroughbred Breeders Association yearling and mixed auction. He paid between $700 and $1,000 each for the horses listed on the Facebook page. Their price via the Facebook page ranged from $1,650 to $2,350. It’s unclear whether Nalls still has ownership of the horses, or if he has sold them to a third party.
As of this writing, three had been sold to undisclosed purchasers.
Tom Early, board member of the Louisiana Thoroughbred Breeders’ Association and chairman of the group’s sales committee, says the topic will likely come up at the LTBA’s December board meeting.
Nalls, who Early said lives in Louisiana and is not an active participant in the Thoroughbred industry, also bought a group of horses out of last year’s sale that turned up on the same page, also for escalated prices, also under threat of shipping to slaughter houses in Canada or Mexico. After that, Early said the board decided to raise the minimum price for broodmares – which accounted for four of Nalls’ purchases last year – from $500 to $1,000, in hopes of discouraging traders from buying horses cheap to flip them. Yearlings already had a minimum price of $1,000.
Last year, the same Facebook page listed five horses previously purchased by Nalls, four of which were broodmares and one of which was a yearling.
Early said the board “never dreamed” Nalls would pay as much as $1,100, which was his maximum bid in the ring this year.
“We have a board meeting in December, and I imagine we’re probably going to raise the minimum up to $2,000 on everything to try to deal with the problem,” he said. “It’s a tricky situation, because it is a public auction.”
Early said the board didn’t consider a ban on Nalls a practical solution to discourage this business practice.
“He’s just going to send somebody else that we don’t recognize,” said Early.
Early also said Nalls has agreed to release the horses’ registration paperwork to whoever buys them from the pen, which would enable a buyer to race or breed them if desired – thereby helping them retain some value as bloodstock. He does not believe Nalls bought any horses privately at the barns.
Commercial horse slaughter no longer takes place in the United States, but does still happen in both Canada and Mexico. Even as the actual number of horses exported for slaughter has declined significantly in the past 15 years (according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data), more and more Facebook pages have emerged, claiming to have possession of horses that are at risk of being exported in the immediate future. Horses are offered to the public with a “bail price” to get them out of the “pen” or holding facility where they’re kept – hence the interchangeable terms “bail pens” or “kill pens.” Despite the tight deadlines advertised, these pages are sometimes run by individuals who don’t have fulfillment contracts with foreign slaughterhouses themselves and often charge significantly more for each horse than what those slaughterhouses are likely to pay.