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Leading a horse to slaughter
By Emile Hallez
ehallez@mscd.edu

The unwanted racehorse dies a dignified death. A technician gently aims a high-pressure gun against the animal’s temple and squeezes a trigger; a loud bang accompanies a metal bolt piercing the horse’s skull. Its body falls to the ground, writhing and kicking, before it is bled to death, sliced apart and shipped off to Europe, Asia and dog food factories.

If the idea of killing healthy horses makes you cringe, congratulations: You are among a rising opposition in the U.S. to commercial horse slaughter. Recent congressional action has pressured the handful of the country’s equine-processing plants, archaic as they are, to shut their doors. Cavel International, a Belgian-owned facility in Dekalb, Ill. remains, where unlucky horses are still ground into dog chow.

Two bills circulating through Congress include an amendment to the Horse Protection Act to prohibit “horses and other equines to be slaughtered for human consumption, and other purposes.”

“Other purposes” seems intentionally vague – a rogue term that could be up for debate should the bill graduate to law. Perhaps the rationale for specifying “human consumption” is to appeal to the generalization that Americans find ingesting horse flesh repugnant.

Much of the world may disagree. While the sale of horse meat for human consumption is illegal within the U.S., the country has for years exported domestically butchered equines to Europe and Asia. In Japan, sakura, which means “cherry blossom” because of its bright red color, is raw horse flesh served in everything from sashimi to ice cream. And for the few Americans who crave horse, there is no law preventing them from eating dog food.

Though the new legislation may be exalted by horse lovers, it just makes this vegan shrug. It’s another example of mankind’s hypocrisy and bolsters speciesism. It won’t stop people from exploiting horses – breeders are still free to crank out horse after horse, selling them to greed-stricken opportunists who will pit them against each other in races until the animals outlive their usefulness. Instead of being sent to the butcher, each will likely be shot in the head or left to their own devices in the wild.

“It is legal in all states for owners to shoot their unwanted horses, and some websites offer instructions for doing it with little pain. But some horse owners do not have the stomach for that,” stated a recent Associated Press article. “There have been reports of horses chained up in eastern Kentucky and left for days without food or water. Others have been turned loose in the countryside.”

The problem doesn’t stem from European desires to have their chins dripping with horse blood – it comes from this country’s elitist lust for horseracing. If there were not a surfeit of horses, there would not be controversy over the destinies of their corpses.

Boycott the Kentucky Derby. Instead of riding a burro at the Grand Canyon, use your own legs. And for god’s sake, stop watching donkey shows. Until we can see these animals as more than material possessions, the point of what we do with their dead bodies is relatively moot.