Medical horse stories - horses in medicine

E: The Environmental Magazine, Dec, 1994 by Will Nixon

Sometimes medicine isn't as glamorous as it sounds. Take Premarin, the leading estrogen replacement drug prescribed to about eight million women to prevent the "hot flashes" of menopause or the "dowager's hump" of osteoporosis in old age. Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories has made the drug for 50 years, but the basic ingredient remains a natural estrogen collected from the urine of pregnant mares.

To make Premarin, about 80,000 horses stand for almost six months in narrow stalls every winter and pee into cups that catch their valuable waste at 500 farms in the prairies of Canada and North Dakota. "It has never been duplicated in a laboratory," says Dr. Marc Deitch of Wyeth-Ayerst. But some animal rights groups don't even want it to be produced in the stalls. "There are six plant-derived alternatives to Premarin that are very acceptable, so women should know that this drug contains the hidden ingredient of animal cruelty," says Trina Bellack of the Humane Society of the United States. Many of the foals produced by these mares are later slaughtered for meat shipped to Paris and Tokyo.

In summer, the mares romp and roam on the farms with their young foals and stallions, but in October they enter the stalls and the controversy begins. They stand on concrete or rubber matting and rarely venture out for exercise in the dead of winter, when temperatures range from zero to minus 40. Shauna Spurlock, a veterinarian from Virginia horse country hired by Wyeth-Ayerst to visit some farms, says that the cups have improved greatly over the past 20 years. "I looked at every rear end--there wasn't a chafe mark on them." And, she claims, the horses are healthy. "You can't get a sick horse pregnant. These have a conception rate of 90 percent."

Tom Hughes of Canadian Farm Animal Care Trust agrees, sort of: "These farms are a thousand times better than the old days," he says, adding that they now follow voluntary standards stricter than anything you find for other farm animals.

But Bellack says that nothing could be less natural for horses than standing in stalls. "They want to roam free and cover a good distance every day," she says. After 24 hours in a stall, she adds, their legs swell from inactivity.

"This isn't just about horses," adds Elizabeth Carlyle of the Manitoba Animal Rights Coalition. "Why is menopause considered a disease?" she asks. Men don't need drugs for their hormonal changes. And osteoporosis could be prevented by eating a vegetarian diet low in fat and protein. And then she asks the most provocative question in this debate: "Why not use human urine?" If horses can pee for medicine, why can't we?