Why not eat horses?, part 2

[urbpan]

I thought I'd just posted about the horse slaughter issue, but apparently it's been a full year. The link in the previous sentence leads to my post about an email (from an animal protection organization I'm interested in), asking us all to lobby congress to make it illegal to slaughter horses for food. Apparently the House of Representatives has approved a bill to this effect.


My feeling is, if there are thousands of horses that need to be destroyed, why not sell the meat for food? One zoo director has become involved, as well, because the big cats that live in zoos eat mainly processed horse meat.

If you are against factory farming, or slaughterhouses, you must be against them for all animals. There is no important neurological difference between a cow and a horse that makes slaughter less humane for horses. Any opposition to horse slaughter comes from a sentimental attachment to one species over another, and is not logically consistent, and in my opinion, is basically indefensible.

There's also a xenophobic aspect to the bill: Americans don't eat horses, but the French and Japanese do. This is why the slaughter of cows will never be made illegal in the U.S.--We'd all starve! But since those weird foreigners are the dirty horse-eaters, why not ban horse slaughter?

I do not support factory farms, but I am in favor of humane slaughter. Treating animals like food does not bother me. Treating animals like some kind of inanimate raw material, like iron ore or something, that bothers me. Farm animals should be respected, their lives should not be misery, and we should expect meat to be expensive in exchange for treating our animals well.

Comments

[by-steph.livejournal.com]

Much of the push to slaughter horses is coming from ranchers that want to use public lands to overgraze their cattle on. This is the same reason the bison from Yellowstone are killed. There has been no documented case of brucellosis transmission between bison and cattle. For the most part it is not an inability of the land to support the horses or the bison. The land cannot support the destructive cattle industry and horses and bison. The slaughter of wild horses is not what I would consider humane. They can be shot in the wild, or, they can be rounded up from the wild and trucked in to slaughter houses. To manage an animal at a slaughterhouse that is not accustomed to humans will not be a humane death if you consider a reduction of stress one of the components of humane slaughter. This push to end horse slaughter didn't come about because people were upset that old horses were being sent to slaughter. This came about because of the Burns (R-MT) Amendment to the Wild and Free-roaming Horses and Burros Act. If it is thought that bleeding hearts have gone overboard, then The Man needs to stop doing $hit that people will react to. The argument of not being a hypocrite in killing some animals and loving others does not need to go the direction of Lets Kill All Animals For Food. It's like the Feminist objection to having a door held open for a woman. Instead of a world where everyone lets doors slam other people in the face to uphold Equality, how about a world in which everyone holds a door open for everyone else.

[cottonmanifesto.livejournal.com]

you need to check out the pet_debate post on this subject.