The “Albuquerque Journal” recently toured the horse slaughterhouse in New Mexico that is awaiting a USDA permit to open. The reporter provided all the gory details in a story published May 9, 2013.
I’m not even going to link to the story. The process is as bad as I suspected.
And it wouldn’t need to be nearly that bad for me to consider it inhumane.
When did slaughter proponents get the idea that horses are stupid?
One of my geldings takes off at a gallop when the vet drives in, and the worst thing the vet has ever done to him is give him a shot.
Horses can smell the proverbial rat a mile away (no offense to the vet), and every step of the slaughter process will cause great distress to a horse.
Try to imagine your own horse being loaded into an unsafe trailer packed with other stressed horses, arriving at a plant that reeks of blood, hearing the sounds of other screaming horses, and then undergoing the trip through the slaughterhouse itself.
No one who loves and respects horses would put a horse through that process, just as they wouldn’t put their human loved ones through it.
Slaughter proponents argue that there are too many horses in the world.
Slaughter is not the ethical answer.
This is not how the world is dealing with human population issues.
Mass killing is just that.
Horse slaughter is a crutch that allows people who call themselves horsemen to breed indiscriminately, because someone else will clean up the mess.
In Europe, someone tried to clean up the mess by slipping thousands of unwanted horses into the food chain, and people the world over were appalled.
But the real guilt lies with the breeders. Breeders need to be accountable for each and every horse they help create. Slaughter needs to end. Horses, and I would argue all animals, need to be treated as equal partners on this Earth.
If we wouldn’t want to be killed in a slaughterhouse, we shouldn’t send horses down that road.