As the fight over horse slaughter continues in the courts, I can’t help but wonder what slaughter plant owners are thinking.
They’re not going to succeed. Too many influential and deep-pocketed people are against horse slaughter because it is just plain wrong.
Plant owners are certainly not going to win any popularity contests. In fact, I would imagine their safety is at some risk.
They are not going to have a clear conscience. No matter how cold their soul, they cannot be able to go home at night and forget what they have been a part of all day.
The worst thing I’ve read lately is coverage on August 9, 2013, of the fight over a slaughter plant in Missouri by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The news outlet talked to attorney Cynthia MacPherson, of Mountain Grove, Mo., who fought successfully to prevent a plant from opening there.
MacPherson said: “I’ve talked to people in De Kalb (where a plant used to operate). They’ll tell you they heard the horses screaming all night.”
Can you imagine?
I can’t sleep when my neighbor weans his cows, and I have to listen to a mother cow moan all night. I would be suicidal if I lived near a horse slaughter plant and listened to the fear in those horses’ voices over and over.
So why would a plant owner do this?
It’s akin to fighting for the right to be a bully, bigot and mass murderer. In the end, it’s really all three, isn’t it? Targeting horses, treating them like lesser beings and killing them assembly style.
The plant owners are saying: “We’re going to kill horses because we can.”
Is this ego? It can’t be due to good business savvy.
If you were an entrepreneur, would you start a business that most of America opposed?
Would you invest money in a plant that may never open?
Would you sell animals as safe to eat that had been loaded up with drugs, setting yourself up for a lawsuit?
As of August 2013, horse slaughter plants in New Mexico and Missouri were fighting court orders preventing them from opening over issues related to the environmental impact of drugs in the horses’ system possibly tainting wastewater from the plants. The owner of an Iowa plant saw the writing on the wall and abandoned his plans for horse slaughter, showing far more common sense that the Missouri and New Mexico plant owners.
This is not to suggest that the United States doesn’t have a horse overpopulation problem, at least in terms of having enough resources to care for the horses produced by breeders every year. There is no good solution on the table for that problem right now.
Horse slaughter is a bad solution. We don’t kill off whole populations of people when resources are scarce, though some dictators have tried.
People with brains will come up with a solution for horses. It will not be mass slaughter.
I hope the doors of these plants never open. I hope Congress comes through and institutes a ban on slaughter and follows that up with a ban on exporting horses for slaughter, preventing these animals from taking exhausting trips to countries where they face much more deplorable conditions.
I also realize Congress is incapable of doing much of anything anymore.
But I am heartened by the fact that most of the nation is united against this barbaric behavior, and this practice doesn’t stand a chance in the 21st century.
Slaughter plant owners will be the biggest losers, even if they win for a day or two.