Horse slaughter is back on the table, so to speak. What
amounted to a congressional ban against the practice ended when the 2011
Agriculture Appropriations bill reinstated federal funding for inspecting
horses before they’re sent to a slaughterhouse.
But it’s hard to know what will happen next. The
Bureau of Land Management’s advisory board overseeing free-ranging horses and
burros has been stacked with pro-slaughter ranching advocates, who are only
thinly disguised as neutral citizens. One recently appointed member advocates
for commercial slaughter as a management strategy for wild horses.
The board is pro-slaughter because that is all the BLM
has ever been, ever since the days when it helped round up wild horses for Rin
Tin Tin’s dog bowl in the 1920s. The federal agency has long backed the
interests of the ranching, recreation, development and dog-food industries,
despite running a few adoption programs in an attempt to pacify people like me
and other annoying horsey lovers.
For those who would argue that the BLM is at least
trying to help wild horses — even by sending them to slaughter for their own
good — I ask: Since when have Americans set the bar so low? How can we
possibly find it acceptable to house over 34,000 horses, more than half of the
wild horse population in America, in BLM holding pens awaiting an uncertain
fate that is likely to end in slaughter? And why did it take a lawsuit before
Laura Leigh, reporter for Horseback Magazine, could gain access to the BLM’s
wild horse roundups? When the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in her
favor Feb. 12, 2012, it said that “an open government has been the hallmark of
our democracy since our nation’s founding.”
The more disappointing aspect of the debate about
slaughtering horses is that it evades the real issues. Why don’t we admit that
slaughter has never been an effective means to control or manage populations of
unwanted, used-up and abandoned horses, whether they’re wild or domestic?
There is just no way to make slaughtering equines humane.
A bolt-gun is generally shot into an animal’s brain to render it unconscious,
but this method fails to work with horses. The animals resist the restraint and
then panic, filled with fear. Given the combination of the large, terrified
animals and the typically unskilled and low-paid workers who are hired to
process them on the assembly line, the situation is a set-up for extreme animal
cruelty. This is well documented in reports by the U.S. Department of
Agriculture.
We should be ashamed of ourselves after all these years
for being so ill informed or ignorant; to be as willing as we are to
deliberately close our eyes to the facts. What happened to the pride we once
had, back when we saw wild horses as living symbols of our national heritage?
Continuing the same old capture-and-removal routine for
wild horses has never worked, while slaughter just gives breeders license to
abandon horses at will, permits kill-buyers to thrive, allows racehorse owners
to dispose of horses that proved disappointing at the track, and enables horse
owners who fail to train their animals properly to shirk their responsibility.
What’s more, it perpetuates a sad history: Thousands of U.S. warhorses went
straight into the can after meritorious service, starting with World War I. And
even with what amounted to a ban on slaughtering horses in this country, the
Government Accounting Office reported that approximately 138,000 U.S. horses
went to slaughter in 2010 alone, shipped to Canada and Mexico, where the equine
slaughter industry continues unabated.
What makes this shameful is that here in the United
States, we have the world’s first and only dedicated wildlife fertility-control
facility, the Science and Conservation Center, in Billings, Mont. Led by Jay
Kirkpatrick, the world’s foremost researcher on fertility control in wild
horses, it has used PZP — Porcine Zona Pellucida — a reversible, non-hormonal
contraceptive with a 24-year history of success, all over the country on urban
deer and 85 species of zoo animals, including wild bison, and even on 14
different populations of African elephants in the Republic of South Africa.
Why we haven’t been routinely using PZP here in this country is a
mystery.
Contraception works, and it is especially critical for us
to implement this approach now that it has finally been approved for use in
wild horses by the Environmental Protection Agency. For years, Australia and
other countries have cited PZP’s lack of “official” U.S. endorsement, as a
reason for selecting a “by any means necessary” approach to the disposal of
wild horses.
Unfortunately, those “any means necessary” include aerial
shooting, chasing and rounding up animals from horseback, capture and removal,
and, of course, slaughtering them for domestic pet food and overseas meat
consumption. We have the technology to control overpopulation of wild horses,
and it is long past time for us to use it. We should know by now that slaughter
is the wrong way to go.
Mae Lee Sun is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). She is the editor of the Wild Horse
Journal.
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