Canada's shame
OCTOBER 2005
Horse slaughter ban clears U.S. Senate & House
WASHINGTON D.C.––The U.S. Senate on September 20, 2005 voted 68-29 to ban horse slaughter for human consumption for one year, as an amendment to a USDA budget bill.
Introduced by Senator John Ensign (R-Nevada), the bill would prevent the USDA from paying the wages and expenses of horse slaughter and horse meat inspection staff.
An identically worded amendment jointly introduced by four U.S. Representatives cleared the House 269-158 in June 2005.
“The House and Senate bills which contain the horse slaughter amendments now go to conference committee to create a final law,” explained Chris Heyde of the Society for Animal Protective Legislation, the legislative arm of the Animal Protection Institute. “As a result of the strong support for both the House and Senate versions of this amendment, it is unlikely that the conference committee will decide to omit the horse slaughter language from the final budget. However,” Heyde cautioned, “because this is a budget bill, after passage into law, it will be in effect for [only] one fiscal year, beginning November 1.
“While legislation currently is pending in Congress to permanently prohibit the trade and transport of live horses intended for human consumption,” Heyde continued, “as well as banning the actual slaughter of horses for human consumption (HR 503), that legislation has not yet made its way through the Congressional process. The budget amendment would serve as a stop-gap measure to protect horses from slaughter for the next year.”
The three active U.S. horse slaughterhouses killed 58,736 horses for human consumption in 2004, according to the USDA. Horse meat was exported to the European Union, Japan, Mexico and Switzerland.
About 20,000 horses per year are trucked from the U.S. to Canadian slaughterhouses.
As recently as 1990, U.S. slaughterhouses killed 315,000 horses, and Canadian slaughterhouses killed 235,000 more.
The U.S. horse slaughter toll may rise this year, though not to nearly the 1990 level, due to an amendment to the 1971 Wild and Free Ranging Horse and Burro Protection Act slipped through Congress as a last-minute rider to the November 2004 Consolidated Appropriations Act. The amendment ordered Bureau of Land Management to sell “without limitation” any “excess” wild horse or burro who has been impounded, who is more than 10 years of age, or who has been offered for adoption three times without a taker.
The BLM has taken about 10,000 horses and burros from the range in each of the past three years, and planned to take 10,000 more in 2005.
“In another welcome move,” said HSUS president Wayne Pacelle, “the Senate also approved two additional animal welfare amendments introduced by Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-HI). One amendment would ensure that downed livestock—animals too sick or injured to walk—are not allowed into the human food supply. The second amendment would prohibit tax dollars from being used for research facilities that buy animals from dealers who traffic in family pets for research.”