Newsdate: Thu 26 December 2013 – 6:25 am
Location: WASHINGTON, DC

A bill coming before the US Congress in January 2014 by the House and Senate Agriculture Appropriations committee includes language barring the U.S. Department of Agriculture from funding inspections at horse slaughter plants.

Hoping to defund horse slaughter

A bill coming before the US Congress in January 2014 by the House and Senate Agriculture Appropriations committee includes language barring the U.S. Department of Agriculture from funding inspections at horse slaughter plants.
© 2013 by Carien Schippers

This provision would reinstate a prohibition that had been in place from 2007 to 2011. Horse advocates see It as urgently needed since at least three companies are about to open horse

Michael Markarian, the chief program and policy officer of the Humane Society of the United States and president of The Fund for Animals, said the law change was urgently needed, given the pending opening of horse slaughter plants in the US.

 It makes no sense for the federal government to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to oversee new horse slaughter plants at a time when Congress is so focused on fiscal responsibility.

Horse advocates see horse slaughter as cruel and say that it cannot be made humane. In addition, the U.S. public overwhelmingly opposes it. Horses are shipped for more than 24 hours at a time without food, water, or rest in crowded trucks in which the animals are often seriously injured or killed in transit.

Horses are skittish by nature due to their heightened fight-or-flight response, and the methods used to slaughter them rarely result in quick, painless deaths; they often endure repeated blows during attempts to render them unconscious and sometimes remain alive and kicking during dismemberment.

Suppliers for horse slaughter plants buy up young and healthy horses, often by misrepresenting their intentions, and kill them to sell the meat to Europe and Japan. Horse advocates are pressing to have the horse slaughter provision sustained in the omnibus bill that Congress plans to act on by January 15 to avoid another government shutdown.