For decades, one of the best kept secrets has been the abuse of horses to produce an estrogen (hormone) replacement drug called Premarin. Wyeth-Ayerst Labratories uses the urine of pregnant mares to manufacture the drug, which is taken by millions of post-menopausal women. In 1992, sales of Premarin amounted to $642 million -- 14 percent of Wyeth-Ayerst's $4.5 billion revenue.
As many as 100,000 mares are on the production line of 600 farms in North Dakota and Manitoba, Canada, confined to stalls for 7 months of their 11 month pregnancies so that their urine can be collected. After the mares give birth to foals each spring, they are impregnated again and put back in the stalls. The foals are an unfortunate by-product of the production line, and most are sent off to slaughter to end up as food in Europe and Japan.
It doesn't have to be this way. More than a half dozen estrogen alternatives are available, all of them derived from plants or synthetics, most of them approved by the Food & Drug Administration for the same uses as Premarin. A number of herbal and dietary alternatives to estrogen may produce the same beneficial results.