Horses Shouldn’t Suffer Because You Reach Menopause

My friend, Linda, always gets me to thinking. She has a deep reverence for living things and we have shared many conversations about our responsibilities, as human beings, to the non-human inhabitants of this planet.

Given her sensitivity and conscience in such matters, I often find myself contemplating her ideas long after our discussion has ended. This happened recently, and the subject was a compelling one for women our age - menopause and the ethical treatment of its symptoms.

Ethics? What do ethics have to do with menopause? Hormone-replacement therapy is a medical-health-personal-choice issue, but an ethical one as well?

Indeed, it is. I started looking into this after Linda mentioned that she could no longer use Premarin, a widely used estrogen supplement, because of the way it is obtained. Premarin, as its name hints, is taken from the urine of pregnant mares. I checked the Internet and found data published by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), The Columbus Free Press, The Animals Voice Magazine and several others. I now understand why Linda was adamant about this issue.

These mares are factory farmed in North Dakota and the central Canadian provinces. They are artificially inseminated and kept pregnant almost continually. They are confined in stalls so small they cannot take even a few steps, turn around or lie down comfortably.

The mares are given insufficient water to drink in order to concentrate their urine, thus concentrating the estrogen therein. These horses are tightly fitted with plastic or rubber sacs to catch their urine, often causing sores and painful urinary tract infections.

Foals born from these pregnancies - reportedly 75,000 per year - are considered unwanted byproducts of the process and are usually weaned, fattened and sent to slaughter, then exported to Europe and Japan for human consumption.

Linda says she sometimes feels she can’t bear to live in a world where human beings can act with such cruelty. And Premarin is but one example of the callous acts of animal exploitation occurring today.

Let me illustrate with a few examples from PETA’s World Wide Web site, The Caring Consumer:

Carmine, a reddish substance used to color lipsticks, shampoos and red applesauce, is made from the crushed and powdered bodies of the female cochineal beetle. It takes roughly 70,000 of these little creatures’ carcasses to render a pound of carmine.

Bee pollen, found in nutritional supplements, shampoos, toothpastes and deodorants, is collected from the legs of bees. Their legs are often torn off by pollen-collection trapdoors.

The ingredients that make musk fragrances, formerly a favorite of mine, are stolen, painfully, from the genitals of beavers, muskrats and civet cats.

The list of animal abuses committed by humans in the testing and manufacturing of products we regularly consume is staggering. The good news is that there are vegetable alternatives to most animal-based ingredients.

For hormone replacement therapy, there are many synthetic and plant-based estrogen products that the Food and Drug Administration has approved as safe and effective alternatives to Premarin. In fact, an Internet site, Menopause Online, lists nine such plant-based estrogens and only one animal-based estrogen - Premarin.

According to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, synthetic estrogen works as well as, if not better than, Premarin.

Yet, a recent ad for Premarin indicates that this medication is currently taken by more than 9 million women in the United States alone. More than 40 billion Premarin tablets have been sold.

This is big business and has the potential to become much bigger as the baby boomer generation reaches menopause. When we understand that plant-based or synthetic estrogens are legitimate options, it becomes clear that the merciless treatment of mares is unnecessary. We must face the ethical implications of our hormone replacement choices.

Before my discussion with Linda, I was ignorant of all this and certainly more comfortable for it. But now I know too much to fail to correct my own complicity when I can.

What can we do?

Take the blinders off and educate ourselves. Urge the manufacturers of products like Premarin to stop the cruelty. Talk with one another and voice our concerns.

Be willing to pay a little more or look a little harder for products that do not depend on animal exploitation. And vote our preferences with our consumer dollars.

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