Dilemma on the moor: The truth about pony slaughter on Dartmoor

A Trebor strong mint presented on the flat of his palm is all it takes to lure the Dartmoor hill pony to its death. As it eagerly approaches from within its holding pen, knackerman Andrew Goatman slowly raises his other hand behind the three-year-old mare's head and releases the boltgun into a one-inch "sweet spot" just above the eyes on her forelock. The pony slumps to the floor. Within five hours of her death, she is being butchered, ready to be fed to the lions and other carnivores at a local zoo.


"They have a blind spot," says 32-year-old Goatman as he sharpens his knife on a steel at the zoo's dedicated butchering facility. "They can't see my hand come in. I will try to talk to them, just to reassure them. But they know nothing about it. The steel bolt enters their brain at 700mph."

With the dead mare now hanging from a hook by one of her hind legs, Goatman uses his knife to swiftly sever the head from the body. In less than 30 minutes, he has removed the hoofs and guts – including a four-month-old foetus – and halved the remaining carcass with a specialist chainsaw. After tipping blue food dye over the meat to mark that it's not fit for human consumption, Goatman hoses the spilt blood into the drain before moving on to repeat the process on a dead foal.

Slaughtering Dartmoor ponies and feeding them to big cats at a zoo has become routine. When news of the practice came to light earlier this week, web forums devoted to animal welfare issues dripped with outrage. But the act of feeding these ponies to the lions is, say its advocates, part of a desperate conservation effort to save not just the ponies themselves, but also the moorland upon which they roam.

"There are now fewer breeding ponies on Dartmoor than there are breeding pandas in the wild," says Benjamin Mee, owner of Dartmoor zoological park in south Devon, where the ponies are taken by Goatman to be butchered. "There are only 900 pure-bred breeding mares left on the moors, and they are an essential part of the habitat up there.

"In the 1930s, there were said to be 30,000. By grazing the gorse and bracken, they help to maintain the moorland and even help to create the right conditions for rare fritillary butterflies. No one is doing this to make money. This is simply about ensuring the pure bred Dartmoor ponies survive, and enabling a more humane way for the unwanted cross-bred ponies to be culled, that doesn't involve long road journeys into Europe where there is a market for their meat and skins."

Goatman adds that without the ponies, there would be a greater reliance on "swaling" (controlled burning) to manage the gorse. "The ponies eat the fresh gorse shoots as a form of worm prevention. Swaling carries the risk of setting off an uncontrollable underground peat fire."

The demand for meat is vast. Just one of the zoo's three tigers will eat up to 15kg of pony meat a day – that's a large adult pony (up to 100kg) per tiger per week. Then there are the lions, bears, jaguars, lynx, cheetahs and wolves to feed – all require fresh meat. "The deal we have with Andrew [Goatman] is that we host the facility for him to butcher the ponies in exchange for the meat. He then sells on surplus meat to some other local zoos, such as Paignton zoo or Combe Martin wildlife park on Exmoor." (Newquay zoo in Cornwall is currently considering whether to buy the pony meat, too.)

Goatman says he needs other zoos to pay 75p a kilo for the pony meat for the trade to be sustainable economically. "The farmer who owned the pony gets 25p per kilo dead weight, the transport costs work out at 25p, and I get 25p per kilo as the slaughterman. It should make sense, as Paignton zoo has been paying 89p for what we call 'miscellaneous knackermeat', which can be anything slaughtered on a farm. It's all about trying to create a market for the otherwise unwanted ponies, which would either be shot by the farmer or turfed back on to the moors, which causes all sorts of problems with cross-breeding."

The practice of feeding ponies to zoo animals isn't new; it has been taking place for years, albeit on a much, much smaller scale. "I've shot 700 ponies altogether this year," says Goatman. "That's up sevenfold on last year. About a third now go to the zoos. I don't like doing it, but it's about securing a future for the breed. We have to try and create a market for the 'rubbish' – the 5% to 10% that just don't make the grade. In the long term, it will help to restore the market for pure-bred ponies, which is in everyone's interest as it will ensure the Dartmoor ponies remain on the moors."

Tim Garrett has been holding pony auctions for Rendells auctioneers in Chagford for "longer than he cares to remember". He's seen the price of ponies rise and fall over the decades, but times have never been as bad as they are now. "Since 2000, when I saw four ponies on one occasion being sold together for a pound, we've been trying to devise a new system to ensure their survival. It's all about nurturing a market. In years gone by there was a demand for pit ponies that were sent down mines. This was largely why these small ponies were being bred here. Up until the second world war, we used to eat horsemeat in this country. Then came the demand for horsemeat in dog food, but that didn't last long. More recently, the market has been for pedigree ponies for children to ride. Since 2000, we've tried to build up a trade in better pedigree, healthier ponies, many of which were going to Ireland. But we've had some real hammer blows in recent years, and not just because of the recession."

The recent introduction of horse passports and microchipping has added about £20 to the cost of buying a pony. Dartmoor's community of pony owners managed to negotiate a clause that stipulates this only comes into force once a pony is taken off the moors, but it has still acted to deflate the market. Some ponies can still sell for as little as £2.50.

But the "killer blow", says Garrett, was the introduction of the EU welfare in transport regulation which, since 2009, has demanded that horses must be transported in single partitions on journeys longer than eight hours, or on ferries. "This has destroyed our trade to Ireland completely," he says. "Dartmoor ponies are herd animals. They hate to be split up. It is cruel to isolate them like this. But it has also made the cost of transporting them totally uneconomic. Within a decade, I don't think there will be any ponies left on the moors."

Garrett says the problem is unique to Dartmoor. The ponies on Exmoor and in the New Forest are pedigree and/or registered. "Here, they are cross-bred with lots of different stallions. Pedigrees are rare here and are often deemed too valuable to be allowed to run wild."

The animal welfare lobby has argued that the problem could be remedied by the removal or control of stallions. Local resident Charles Brenin has set up a Facebook page called Think Before You Breed: "Why breed something for which there is no market? The numbers could easily be maintained for conservation grazing without the mares breeding every year. They could be served by good Dartmoor stallions when there is a need to maintain numbers. Not this constant breeding and culling. It has to stop."

But Garrett says this is a simplistic approach that fails to understand how ponies survive on the moors. "Stallions are crucial for controlling the way a herd is held together. Some herds contain up to 70 ponies. Take the stallion away and it will be chaos. They will lose their lear [the local term for hefting, where animals, such as sheep and horses, instinctively keep to a certain area of the moor]. And it costs £40 to geld [castrate] a pony. Who is going to pay for that?"

A few miles north of the Tavistock Inn at Poundsgate stands Charlotte Faulkner's moorland farm. On the steep, bracken-filled slopes above the farm, three ponies sense she is holding treats in her hand, and slowly begin the descent. "I just love this place," says Faulkner, founder of the Dartmoor Hill Pony Association and the leading campaigner attempting to preserve the ponies. "I cry whenever I leave the moors. But we are at crisis point. I'm devastated about the plight of the ponies. I'm passionate about saving them. Of course, we don't want to have to shoot them and feed them to lions, but we are exhausting our options."

Over the past decade, Faulkner says she has "tried everything" to maintain a sustainable market for the ponies in an attempt to ensure their survival. "The welfare disposal scheme with the zoos is a very small part of our plan. It's simply a reaction to the recession. We had got the price of foals up to £60, but the recession has knocked this right back again. We have also worked with Natural England on establishing a 10-point plan aimed at producing a more sustainable situation. But Natural England now faces a cull of its own due to the government's cuts. They've been very supportive to date, but they don't even know if they've got jobs themselves. It's desperate."

Faulkner rejects the accusation that pony owners on Dartmoor have not sensibly managed the pony population. "We haven't been breeding irresponsibly. Removing stallions just doesn't work, especially on the high moor." But she says she will keep looking for alternatives. "We're just farmers at the end of day, but we must find a solution. If we don't, it will be a very different Dartmoor in 10 years' time."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/11/dartmoor-ponies-slaughter-zoo-feeding-lions