What is the Scoop on Horse Slaughter?
What horses are slaughtered?
Horses of all ages, breeds, and genders, can be put up for slaughter. Even pregnant mares and foals. Any horse of any discipline. The houses purchase the horses, then send them off for the end of their life.
How many U.S. horses were slaughtered?
According to the USDA, the two slaughter plants in Texas killed 49,235 horses in 2003 for human consumption and about twenty thousand horses were transported to Canada and Mexico for slaughter. Together, these numbers represent about 1% of the total number of horses in the U.S.
That's a lot of horses who could have lived out happy lives, but were killed for the sake of their meat.
If horses weren't slaughtered, what would happen to them?
The annual number of horses slaughtered in the US dropped from over 300,000 in the 1990s to less than 50,000 in 2003, with no special infrastructure needed to absorb the thousands of "unwanted" horses that were not slaughtered. Horses are being kept longer, sold to others, humanely euthanized, or donated to retirement and rescue facilities. The "surplus horse population" is a myth.
Horses are being killed for no reason. We shouldn't be killing horses, because we're not the ones who eat them. The nations that have horse on their menus should keep this evil killing business to themselves. If you want to eat horses, kill your own horses. Stop killing ours. (All slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico are foreignly owned.)
Who consumes horse meat?
Not us, that's for sure. The main nations for horse consumption include
THE BIG QUESTION: How do we happily kill these animals?
Under federal law, horses are required to be rendered unconscious prior to slaughter, usually with a device called a captive bolt gun, which shoots a metal rod into the horse's brain. Prior to the closure of the U.S. horse slaughter plants, it was not uncommon for horses to be improperly stunned and conscious when they were hoisted by a rear leg to have their throats cut. With the export of horses to slaughter increasing more than 300 percent, undercover footage shows live horses being dragged, whipped, and crammed into trucks in 110 degrees on their way to a horrific form of slaughter in Mexico and Canada. These horses are stabbed multiple times in the neck with a "puntilla knife" to sever their spinal cords. This procedure does not render the horse unconscious, and is not a stunning method. Rather, it paralyzes the horse, leaving him/her twitching on the ground, unable to move or breathe, and then they die from suffocation (because their lungs stop working) or from blood loss and dismemberment. Conditions in the slaughterhouse—inside and outside of our borders—are stressful and extremely frightening for horses.
Doesn't that put a nice picture in your head? Doesn't that just make you smile as you sit there eating your juicy little horse steak?