Horse meat may soon be sold in U.S. grocery stores
By Steve Timko, Reno Gazette-Journal
The slaughter of horses for food, stopped in the U.S. in 2006, could resume again under action approved by Congress and signed by the president.
Congress agreed to start paying again for inspections of facilities that slaughter horses.
The Bureau of Land Management has no plans to change its policy that forbids using captured wild horses for meat.
Wild horse advocates call the action bad news.
BLM spokeswoman JoLynn Worley said if a buyer is known to sell horses for slaughter, the BLM can refuse to sell to them. Or if a buyer tries to sell a wild horse for meat, the BLM can refuse to sell to them in the future.
Wild horses have a freeze brand and slaughterhouses are instructed to call the BLM before killing them, Worley said.
Why wouldn’t the slaughterhouse pay for their own inspection?
And really, is there a big demand for horse-meat? I’ll eat just about anything, but I certainly wouldn’t go out of my way to get some of this.
Is there a horse slaughterhouse lobbyist that greased someones palm to get this through!
Slaughterhouses need to be inspected by the USDA in order to process meat for human consumption in the United States. It’s required.
This bill doesn’t mean that horse meat will show up in supermarkets in the U.S. There is no market for horse meat in the states; Canada and overseas is a different story. The majority of U.S. raised horse meat (the horses would have to be raised specifically for consumption, like cattle are) would be exported. Pet horses wouldn’t be used due to the medicines and wormers that they receive.
But, this bill is more likely to benefit the pet food industry, which uses “animal byproducts” including horse meat. Currently, companies have to export horses to Canada or Mexico for slaughtering. It would be far cheaper to slaughter and process the “pet-food grade” horses in the U.S.
This is nothing more then a economic gain for the Alpo and Purina (to name a few).
It is barbaric to eat intelligent beings. Horses are intelligent, sensitive and live in family groups. The BLM rounds them up at great cost and then locks them up indefinitely in “holding pens” where it costs taxpayers a great deal of money to feed and keep them – and for what? So, the BLM could lease our public lands to industrial cattle ranchers whose cattle destroy the land by the way cattle graze (they pull up the plants root and all while horses “crop” the plants, leaving the roots to regenerate…)
The new law was signed by Obama to pander to the meat processing lobby -shame on him! So,we sacrifice our wild horses to create jobs. I heard of an illegal Mexican who had to give up his job in a slaughterhouse because of the extreme cruel way horses are killed: a large nail gets shot into their forehead and then, while often still alive, the horses get yanked up by a pulley by their hind leg and sliced open in the abdomen to remove the entrails… This brutality has been documented by undercover volunteers of Animals’ Angels and PETA. So, go on and eat horse meat after knowing this if you can. I proudly hail from a European nation with thousands of years of horse tradition: we starved during WWII but NEVER lowered ourselves to eat our horses. Or, dogs. Or, cats.