The Humane Society of the United States has filed a legal petition asking the United States Department of Agriculture to treat the use of illegal numbing or masking chemicals on horses’ legs as a felony under the Horse Protection Act.
Cause of high-stepping gait sometimes chemicals
HSUS Petitions United States Department of Agriculture to treat the use of illegal numbing or masking chemicals on horses’ legs as a felony.
These banned substances are used to hide evidence of illegal abuse of horses through the application of painful caustic substances on the horses’ front legs to achieve an artificial high-stepping gait for show competitions.
The petition comes after USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service conducted random testing at various Tennessee Walking Horse competitions, and the results indicate that a shocking 97.6 percent of the samples tested positive for prohibited foreign substances in 2011.
In 2010, 86 percent of samples tested positive. These substances included numbing agents and drugs that mask evidence of abuse. Most troubling, of the 52 horses tested at the Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration, the largest and most prominent walking horse show in the country, every single horse tested positive for illegal agents.
“The horse doping data released by USDA is staggering, and shows that animal abuse continues to be a huge problem in the walking horse industry,” said Jonathan R. Lovvorn, senior vice president & chief counsel for animal protection litigation at The HSUS. “The use of prohibited substances to hide the intentional infliction of pain is a felony, plain and simple, and those responsible should be prosecuted immediately.”
Under the Horse Protection Act, any attempt to interfere with an official’s inspections to determine whether a horse has been sored – the industry term for applying caustic substances – constitutes a felony punishable by up to three years in prison, in addition to significant financial penalties.
The HSUS is calling on the USDA to issue a new rule or policy establishing that any use of banned substances to avoid detection of underlying soring will be treated as a felony, and to refer all such cases to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for prosecution.