Horse Slaughter Still Banned in the U.S. – Helpful or
Hurtful?
Last week I received an email from the American Horse
Publications newsgroup via the Humane Society saying "Today the Senate Appropriations Committee adopted an
amendment...to bar any horse slaughter plants from opening in the United
States. This Senate action mirrors the House action on its version
of the agriculture spending bill. It’s a great outcome, and it sets
us on a trajectory to sustain a crucial provision we secured at the
end of last year to prevent any of these slaughter plants from
opening in the near future."
In January 2014, a federal budget plan that did not include
funding for horse slaughterhouse inspections was passed by Congress and signed
by President Obama. For a timeline of the events leading up to this, click here.
(NOTE: This has nothing to do with
politics, I am only stating the facts.)
Am I a fan of horse slaughter? Absolutely not.
Do I think we need to have it back in the states? YES.
Right now America faces a huge unwanted horse population.
With rescues already overflowing, there’s no place for the horses that people
don’t want, can’t afford to take care of, or can’t afford to humanely
euthanize. Those people could once sell their horse to a regulated and
inspected U.S. slaughterhouse where the horse would be quickly and humanely
euthanized, but now horses are being neglected, turned lose, starving, or put
in an auction where a much worse fate may await them.
Splash before she was rescued by the McCarty family. Photo courtesy of Kaeli McCarty via CHW Network.
The email I received also touched on the kill buyer problem
that the U.S. has. For non-horse people and those who don't know, a kill
buyer purchases a horse at auction and resells the horse to a slaughter facility.
Since there are no operating slaughterhouses for horses in the U.S., horses are
sold to facilities in Mexico and Canada. The horses often suffer long trailer
rides that are overcrowded with little food or water, if any. They freeze
to death in the winter and die of dehydration in the summer.
They also sustain injuries due to being cramped in a small space with a bunch
of anxious horses acting out. Over 100,000 U.S. horses are transported across
country borders for slaughter every year.
Once at the slaughterhouse, a humane death is not promised. Though
some facilities provide a humane and fast death, other places do not. Horses
may be shot in the head with a captive bolt which, if not done accurately, can
only paralyze a horse and not kill it because of the anatomy. In Mexico, there
are slaughterhouses that slit a horse’s throat or stab a horse in the spine to
the point of asphyxiation. When not humanely euthanized, a horse may only be paralyzed
or left unconscious, creating the possibility for the horse to still be alive when
the slaughter process begins.
To make matters worse, horses are not bred and raised to
produce meat, so they are not treated as such. It is nearly impossible to think
of a horse that has never once received phenylbutazone (bute) in their
lifetime. Since horses are still eaten in European countries, the European
Union does not allow meat to be imported from horses that received bute at any
point in their lifetime.
Bute is used as an anti-inflammatory for horses, but can be
deadly to humans. Bute, just one of many equine drugs not safe for human
consumption, can cause aplastic anemia in humans, a disease that damages the
bone marrow and its stem cells. The effect of that is a deficiency of red blood
cells, white blood cells, and platelets. Aplastic anemia is even more
concerning for kids than adults. Because horse meat is leaner, it was being
mixed with other meat and sold in European markets. Europeans were unknowingly
consuming it, some with a negative outcome.
Although the European Union does not allow for horse meat
contaminated with bute, there is so little testing that the meat slips through
the cracks all the time. Canada only tests 1% of the 90,000 or so horses that
go through their slaughterhouses each year because of the vast numbers. They
also test in the horses' fat cells, but bute is stored in the liver tissue. And
Mexico? Testing there isn’t great either.
The United States Federal Drug Administration also bans bute
along with other drugs and medication for horses intended for consumption.
While I do not want to say I support horse slaughter in the
U.S., I have to say I do for now. I'd rather have regulated facilities here in
the states where horses are not placed on miserable trailer rides out of the
country. I'd rather know the act was being done humanely where we can control
it. It would also prevent horses that are starved and uncared for from standing in
a kill pen while in pain, which is especially hard for the older horses. Some older horses that are beyond
saving are lucky enough to get rescued from auction and given an hour of TLC
before they are humanely euthanized. Others will die in a pen or in transport.
If we want to prevent
horse slaughter, we have to take control of the overpopulation problem. I'm not saying slaughter a bunch of horses to fix it, but limit
the number of horses bred and breed responsibly (don't worry, I'm
saving this great subject for a whole different blog post). If greater efforts
were put toward that, then the population of unwanted horses would decrease and
there wouldn't be the numbers to warrant slaughter.
Until that horse world becomes a reality, we live in the
reality of overpopulation and kill buyers. So yes, right now I support bringing
back regulated horse slaughter in the U.S., but I hope one day I can say that I
don't.
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Up next: The Unwanted Horse Part 2:
Huge thank you to my good friend, Kaeli McCarty, for helping
me find more information on this topic! More of it will be used in part 2 in
regards to breeding. Also keep an eye out for the story of Kaeli’s slaughter rescue,
Splash!
Splash and I quickly became friends.
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