English 150
September 15, 2013
Do Something Action Project: Reopening Horse Slaughter Houses in the United States
The United States is the largest horsemeat exporter in the world, because it has the largest recreational horse population. With such recreation going on with horses people tend to breed their pets to combine ideal breeding for a certain activity in hopes of getting the best animal possible, genetically speaking. You must also factor in the owners that sell their horses after a few years of training and game use when the animal is seen as old and is replaced with a younger more fit horse. Slaughter and export become inevitable with this surplus of unwanted and unused horses driving down resale prices to well below $600, which is the object of concern for me. As a young person trying to one day take over my fathers operation, it is nearly impossible for me to see how, with the cost of feed rising and the resale price of horses going down dramatically every year, I will be able to afford to keep our ranch going without the slaughter houses open. I’m not asking for people of the world to eat horses, which is a common what people believe will happen if the slaughter houses open, I am simply hoping that people will see that horse slaughter is not as bad as people perceive it to be.
The current horse slaughter debate that has caused the reopening of slaughterhouses in the US to standstill is a major problem. These facilities have been out of commission sense 2006 (due to lack of funding to inspect the quality and humanity in the buildings), but the bill that banned the use of horse slaughterhouses in the US expired in 2011 and sense then many people have shown an interest in funding the opening these facilities, so the real problem is not that we do not have enough money to fund and inspect the plants but instead, in my opinion is people being uniformed on the issue and seeing it as Nancy Perry, senior vice president of the ASPCA government relations does by saying, “Moving ahead with a government program to fund horse slaughter inspections is a cruel, reckless and fiscally irresponsible move.” I realize that a lot of people view horses as companions more than working animals, but people who actually have worked with horses have a different perspective.
My goal for my do something action project is to put on a seminar where people can come to hear about the benefits of horse slaughter as well as the views of the next generation of ranchers (such as myself) opinion’s on how horse slaughter can help us to keep