The Treatment of Premarin Mares and Foals Essay Example for Free

The Treatment of Premarin Mares and Foals Essay You may begin by asking â€Å"what is Premarin? † This is a female hormone replacement drug taken by menopausal women (women that have reached the age where their menstrual period ends) to help alleviate symptoms of menopause such as hot flashes and vaginal dryness (Pfizer). It is a vaginal estrogen medication that can be substituted by a plant-based drug rather than this horrific drug. Now you may be thinking that this may actually be a good drug. Well, there is a dark side to this drug that the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and popular drug company Pfizer, doesn’t want women to know about. One of those things is the fact that the name Premarin, actually stands for Pregnant Mares Urine. Women are really ingesting horse’s urine. The goal of these drug companies is to gather concentrated pregnant horse’s urine and put it into a pill, vaginal ring, or cream form to distribute to women, giving them hopes of feeling younger. I will explain in more detail about the drug and its effects, but am going to prove that the treatment of these horses while humans attempt to collect the horse’s concentrated urine is completely unacceptable and 100% animal abuse and neglect. We will start at the point of collecting the urine for this drug. There are farms called Pregnant Mare’s Urine (PMU) farms. If you were to visit one of these farms, you would find a barn full of pregnant mares (horses) that are locked in 38 foot stalls, forced to stand for 11 months (a horse’s natural gestation period) with a â€Å"urine collector† hooked to them. One mare provides approximately nine women with estrogen replacement for one year. These mares are turned out at birthing time to give birth and be rebred. Seeing as the mare must be pregnant to be of use to the farms, if the mare does not rebreed within a month and a half, the mare will be put to pasture along with all the foals that go to the â€Å"last chance corral† where they have the ability to be adopted or they will be sent to slaughter. Approximately 9 of 10 colts (male foals) and 8 of 10 fillies (female foals) are sent to slaughter every year (Springhill). Horses that are unfortunate enough to go to slaughter, are generally used for horse meat in Europe and Japanese areas where it is considered a delicacy. This may sound horrific enough, much like a puppy mill producing 60,000 foals per year; however the really disturbing part is yet to be shared. The urine collectors that are hooked up to the mares are rarely cleaned. Now instead of it just being horse’s urine, it’s dirty horse’s urine. And the horse’s urine has to be concentrated, which means these mares must be deprived of water and food, meaning their urine is deprived of any nutrient there may have been. These horses are skin and bones after only a short while, due to the lack of proper nutrition. The FDA approved Premarin and a few other names of the drug, because it does work. However, if you look at the list of 52 extreme side effects, such as vaginal bleeding, increase in blood clots, and increased chances in uterine and breast cancers, which may, in itself detour you from taking this drug (Pfizer). So, why would doctors prescribe this drug to over 9 million women? Most of them only know that they see results when they prescribe this drug and that it is approved through the FDA. The same as with the general public, they don’t get on simple websites and do their homework about what doctors are asking them to ingest. Some of the other names Premarin goes by are Estrace, Estring, Femring, and Vagifem. Some alternatives are Prempro or Provera, which are both plant based ways to harvest estrogen, which offers far fewer serious side effects and just as much of a success rate in being effective. As you can see, Premarin is a dangerous and disgusting drug, that is a cruel and neglectful way of an attempt to make women in their menopausal stage feel better. This is no excuse for humans to treat horses this way, producing 60,000 foals per year, without enough people to adopt them. If you hear of a woman talking about Premarin, or menopause in general, urge them to look into the drugs their doctors want them to take, and if it happens to be Premarin, tell them the truth about these drugs and do not just let them be blinded like the doctors and Pfizer want you to be.