Eating Horses

Yup, you read the title right. I posted a link to this story on Facebook earlier today and couldn't help but also do a blog about it.

Apparently, back on November 18th, without much pomp and circumstance (ok, without ANY), Obama signed into law the reopening of US horse slaughterhouses. The argument here is that no matter what, hundreds of thousands of horses are slaughtered every year - without this law, they are inhumanely shipped to places like Mexico where they are very inhumanely killed. The idea that Congress had was if we do the slaughtering here in the US, we could do the deed more humanely and follow standard practices that are used for other animals consumed (not that all of those practices are humane... I've seen a show about some awful things done to cows...).

All of that said, would you eat horse? Fortunately for me, the state of California has banned both the slaughtering and sale of horse meat for human consumption since 1998... but there are other states that will move forward with this.

I have such a hard time with this one. On the one hand, I know that horse abandonment is up some ridiculous amount (last figure I heard was somewhere in the 60-65% range) and many of those horses die horrible, painful deaths. That said, my worry is that this now creates an industry for breeding horses for their meat. People who abandon their horses now are likely to continue with those behaviors (after all, we have vets that would euthanize their animals now, if necessary), so does this law really stop anything?

I'm actually quite surprised that this made it through Congress with little to no publicity... it will be interesting to see how the backlash is as the story gets out.

What do you think?

Click HERE for just one of the many articles on this subject.