Day: January 12, 2011

Thick smoke hung over downtown late Sunday as lifelong Bryan resident Kathy Court wrapped herself in a blanket and watched her decades-old family business burn to the ground. “This was all we knew. This was our life,” said Court, 52, the owner of Court’s Saddlery, which manufactures equipment for horses and is best known for its award-winning leather saddles. She and co-owner husband Jimmy, 55, took over the business from Jimmy’s parents, who started it when he was just a baby. They were in the same location on the corner of 22nd and Main streets since the

As a rule, Americans don’t eat horse meat. We dropped the habit after World War II, but 14 percent of the world’s population still has a taste for it. That’s more than one billion people. Should Americans be allowed to serve that market? It’s an increasingly thorny question. Until recently, a handful of U.S. slaughterhouses processed horse meat for consumers overseas. But in 2007 Congress cut off the USDA’s funding for inspectors. Since then, says a study published last month in the Journal of Animal Science, a flood of unwanted horses has been unleashed on the American west. About 100,000