The cruelty suffered by American horses exported for slaughter in Mexico and Canada has drawn a bipartisan group of more than 200 veterinarians and a number of animal rights groups to urge Congress to ban the practice.
The gory scenes seen on videos filmed in foreign slaughterhouses include terrified horses slipping and falling in their own blood and trashing upside-down hung from a single leg. The animals can be seen desperately trying to escape after witnessing other horses being beaten and bludgeoned.
It’s the fate they face after being crammed into undersized trailers and transported long distances with no food or water.
“It is hard to imagine that humans are okay with inflicting such agony,” Joanna Grossman, Equine Program Manager and Senior Advisor, Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) told The Epoch Times.
Many lawmakers agree. The bill, expected to be voted on in the new session, already has bipartisan support from 200 Congressional sponsors including Florida Republican Vern Buchanan, one of its prime sponsors.
While the bipartisan House bill is entitled Save America’s Forgotten Equine [SAVE] Act, many of the horses are far from forgotten.
While some of the owners, mostly of race horses past their prime, know the fate of the animal they once cared for when it is sold, many of the horses are stolen by kill buyers posing as animal lovers promising a better life for them.
Illegal horse slaughters have also been discovered in Florida and in other border states to Mexico and Canada. And while horse slaughter is illegal in the United States, The Bureau of Land Management was caught allowing the round up of wild horses living on federal land and sold by kill buyers for profit to Mexico and Canada.
Horse meat in Mexico sells for about 50 cents a pound. The average weight of a horse is 1,000 pounds.
Both the USDA and The European Commission banned the import of horse meat because both agencies deemed it unsafe for human consumption since horses receive a variety of medications and other drugs during their lifetime.
However, it is still widely sold in Mexico and Canada. Horse meat is also popular in Japan and Italy, where horse slaughterhouses are also legal.
In their Dec. 15 letter to Congress urging the passage of the SAFE Act, or HR 3355, veterinarians are also calling for a permanent ban of horse slaughter for meat in the United States.
While it is currently banned by virtue of defunding USDA inspection of U.S. horse slaughter houses, the ban has to be renewed annually.
Surprisingly, what little opposition there is to end the horse slaughter market, it is primarily from the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) and American Association of Equine Practitioners (AAEP).
“The passage of this legislation, without adequate funding or an infrastructure in place to care for unwanted horses, will create a series of unintended consequences that negatively impact the health and welfare of the horse,” AVMA wrote in a statement.
The AAEP has expressed similar concerns.
But as Grossman and others point out, besides inviting horse theft, humane euthanasia is always an option and being unwanted doesn’t excuse animal cruelty.
Dr. Nicholas Dodman is a veterinary behaviorist and Professor Emeritus of Behavioral Pharmacology and Animal Behavior at Tufts University—a member of AVMA, as are many other veterinarians urging the SAFE Act passage. He testified before Congress on past similar legislation that “suffering of horses in slaughter is accentuated by the very fact that they are not raised for slaughter.”
“It is an unethical and dangerous practice to equate horse slaughter with humane euthanasia,” said Dodman. “No ethical veterinarian, faced with a client who has a horse that is old, sick, or otherwise no longer wanted, would suggest that the horse in question should be put on a truck and hauled thousands of miles to slaughter.”
Other opposition to the SAFE Act comes from state farm bureaus and the American Farm Bureau Federation.
The last horse slaughters run in the United States were also foreign owned.
