Horse Slaughter Revisited

[urbpan]

I'm listening to an NPR editorial railing against the slaughter and export of unwanted race horses , by Frank DeFord. I've mentioned the issue here, and at the vegetarians community before.

I'm a bit of a knee-jerk liberal, I confess. Usually on NPR I agree with the liberal editorials and disagree with the conservatives (yes they have conservative commentors). This issue isn't liberal or conservative, it's blindfolded sentiment versus no other solution offered.

The commentor did not offer an alternate method of disposing of the thousands of horses that are unwanted, nor did he mention that the same fate awaits cows (mentally equal if not equally aesthetically pleasing animals) by the thousand-fold. He did ask if we would do the same to our dogs and cats. Why not? 10 to 15 million unwanted animals euthanized every year, and we just send them up chimneys. I'd rather someone eat them than they become part of the greenhouse effect. Not very sentimental, I know, but I don't think that sentiment should be the primary factor in solving problems.

Comments

[ms-cantrell.livejournal.com]

not sure why they couldn't compost them. you can compost table scraps that include meat and bone, why not horses? seems better than landfill, and i'm sure many don't qualify for the human food-chain.

[turil.livejournal.com]

Yeah, yeah! That's what I'm talking about. Use the money that would be spent shipping dead horses all over the planet for creating sustanable cooperatively owned farms in the poverty stricken areas instead. "It's that whole if you teach a man to fish..." sentiment about encouraging independence rather than dependence. (And, I might add, that since there really is plenty of evidence that animal are not so healthy for humans to eat, feeding horses to poor people is kind of like feeding them french fries and potato chips.)