![]() Only a month earlier, the House of Representatives had approved a bill that would effectively shut down U.S. “I can be so attached to a horse I can’t ever sell it, but then on the other hand, when I see a horse that’s crippled, I don’t bat an eye hauling him to the plant.” If Thomas sounded a little defiant, that was to be expected. “There’s not a human being on earth that loves horses more than me,” he said. For that matter, he planned to buy some horses later that night for a few of his contacts in other states. Though he’d retired from the killer buyer business after that plant closed and was now selling cars in Fort Worth, he still came out to Stephenville every month to help the owner, Rusty Addison, run the sale. His speech was salted with certain anachronistic turns of phrase he first learned about the horse business, he told me, working at the Fort Worth Stockyards for “a little bitty Jew man ’bout five foot two who had a livery stable.” He’d started delivering horses to the packers in the sixties, after a plant opened in Palestine, and in time he was taking two trailerloads a week to a slaughterhouse in North Platte, Nebraska. (He also assured me he’d never been in jail.) Slight and spry, he wore starched Wranglers and ostrich boots, and his eyes were alert below the brim of a brand-new Western hat. Yet Jim Bob Thomas was more than willing to talk to me. The meat is then flown to other countries to be eaten by humans or shipped to domestic zoos (as well as to Siegfried and Roy) to be eaten by lions and tigers, while the remaining parts of the carcass are dispatched to the makers of paintbrushes, violin bows, and leather shoes. Many of them end up back in somebody’s pasture, but about 20 percent go to slaughter plants to be butchered. Roughly three hundred horses pass through the Stephenville horse auction each month: ranch horses, cutting horses, roping horses, brood mares, broncs, ex-racehorses, old ponies. Entering freshmen at Tarleton State University arrive on campus towing horse trailers rising hay prices cause the kind of concern that rising gas prices do elsewhere realtors’ listings maintain a separate category for horse properties and on the first Friday of every month, one of the state’s largest regular horse auctions takes place at a barn north of town. So I learned from Jim Bob Thomas, an old trader I met in October at an auction in Stephenville, eighty miles southwest of Fort Worth. What you do want, at the end of the night, is a horse that’s broke and gentle and sound. A horse that’s loose in the back end and swings its hips from side to side (horse people will sometimes refer to this as “doing the Mae West”). A horse with a indentation, often hidden under the saddle blanket, that would mean it had knocked a cap off its hip bone, maybe by sideswiping a trailer door. ![]() A horse with beady eyes and what they call a Roman nose. A horse with pointy little pin ears poking up from his head or a horse with giant ears. A horse with a big swollen knee or a ringbone on the front of the foot or any kind of enlargement of the ankle. ![]() ![]() HERE’S WHAT YOU PROBABLY don’t want to take home from a horse auction.
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