Many animal protection issues and challenges are not resolved quickly—they involve long-term fights that take years. The slaughter of horses for human consumption is one such example.
We and our allies have been working to block horse slaughter plants from opening in the U.S.; to stop the long-distance transport of these companion animals in cramped cattle trucks, bound for a brutal slaughter in Canada and Mexico; and to close down export markets for horse meat in the E.U.
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Our legislative adversaries, fearing to tread on this ground, don’t attempt to provide an outright defense of these extreme abuses of animals.
Instead, they try to cast this business—the business of slaughtering horses to profit from the animals’ exported meat—as some kind of altruistic act that helps the horses.
Today, a quartet of Democrat and Republican senators have introduced a bipartisan bill to end that cruel and archaic practice and put an end to the charade of its defense. In a recent blog, I wrote about the reintroduction of the Safeguard American Food Exports (SAFE) Act, H.R. 1942, in the House of Representatives.
This legislation would save horses from the cruelty of slaughter—a fate that is nothing short of a complete betrayal of an animal who has stood by us throughout history and is revered as a symbol of the American West.
Now U.S. Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), and Susan Collins (R-ME) have introduced a companion bill in the Senate, S. 1214, to completely end the slaughter of American horses for human consumption.
The effort to end horse slaughter has consistently garnered tremendous support with both the public and lawmakers. Polling shows that 80 percent of Americans oppose horse slaughter, and when horse slaughter plants attempted to reopen on U.S. soil in 2013, the public fought back. We don’t slaughter dogs and cats to ship their meat to other countries, and we’ll never accept the idea of slaughtering our horses so they can end up on a foreign dinner plate.
The horse slaughter industry and their financial backers should see the writing on the wall and recognize that they are swimming against the tide of public opinion.
Congress has spoken on this issue as well. For the past two fiscal years, it has rightfully prevented the use of tax dollars for horse slaughter inspections, effectively preventing horse slaughter plants from opening here. And when the House version of the SAFE Act was introduced last month, it gained 71 cosponsors within the first week and a half after the bill was introduced.
Now we have a bipartisan group of leaders in the Senate coming together to put the final nail in the coffin and end horse slaughter for human consumption, once and for all.
In 2012, New Jersey became the most recent state to ban horse slaughter for human consumption. Senator Menendez, the senior senator from the Garden State, has been a strong proponent of animal protection and has championed reforms to protect horses from horrific abuses such as slaughter, inhumane transport, and soring.
Senators Graham, Mikulski, and Collins have also been strong voices for humane values, and—as Senate Appropriations Committee senior members—are well placed to help horses. They will be at the forefront of efforts to make sure that the language preventing the funding of horse slaughter inspections is retained yet again so that no horse slaughter plants can open here while the SAFE Act is pending.
The horse slaughter industry is a predatory, inhumane enterprise. It doesn’t “euthanize” old horses but precisely the opposite: scurrilous players buy up young and healthy horses, often by misrepresenting their intentions, and kill them to sell the meat to Europe and Japan.
It’s time for Congress to pass the SAFE Act and end horse slaughter for human consumption for good. Please take action today, and ask your U.S. Senators and U.S. Representative to cosponsor the SAFE Act.
