Hey, another horse slaughter post

Regular visitors to this blog may think I've lost my horse sense, but scroll down for some incredible dialogue about the morality--or lack of it--of killing unwanted horses. Or horses in general.

However, some people seem believe there aren't any unwanted equines, despite the glut of horses in the auction market.

Saturday afternoon, without much looking, I came across a Lexington Herald-Leader article about, well, unwanted horses that may be headed to a slaughterhouse in Canada or somewhere else outside the United States, since as of Thursday, killing horses for human consumption--their meat was shipped to Europe--was effectively banned by way of a court decision on government inspectors.

In 2005, a Kentucky jury convicted Kathleen Nygaard for cruelty to horses, cats, and dogs--she received a 90 day sentence for her crimes. Local authorities in January of that year found four horses and three dogs in a malnourished state--eighteen other horses on the property were left to the care of Nygaard were put under watch of the Deppen family.

From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

The Deppens' attorney, Bennett E. Bayer of Lexington, said they plan to sell the horses -- about 15 remain -- at auction next month. The other horses have been returned to their owners, he said.

Most of the horses are not valuable, and a few already have been saved from the slaughterhouse once. That creates the prospect that somebody might buy them for slaughter, Bayer said. Horse lovers need to step in "so that way they don't go to the killers," Bayer said.

Now the point of my original horse slaughter post was that the good intentions of anti-horse killing legislation was that serious consequences--a glut of unwanted horses that are expensive to maintain, costly to euthanize, and leave behind a corpse that is difficult (and pricey) to bury or cremate.

And since media reports (which the horse lovers claim are biased) are documenting plummeting prices for less desirable horses at auctions, one can only conclude that since the option of selling horses to end up on the plate of someone in Europe is not available, that's the reason for the glut of unwanted horses.

Now, in the comments section of my earlier horse posts, some have claimed that the horse owners sometimes unwittingly sell the animals to "kill owners." That may be true, but people selling horses must be aware that when they sell a horse at an auction, there is a chance that the equine could end up getting sold to a slaughterhouse.

The commenters also claim that there are available shelter stables available for the horses that would otherwise end up being sold for food. Whereas there may plenty of such places in the United States, until proven otherwise, I have to believe that their claims are unfounded.

In the AP article that inspired my initial horse post, the reporter wrote that people in eastern Kentucky, particularly in the abandoned strip mine area, have seen an increase in the number of now-wild horses there.

In response, Congressman Ed Whitfield (R-KY) wrote in a letter-to-the-editor in the Chicago Tribune:

Though I knew the article to be completely inaccurate, I did investigate. When contacted for confirmation about this particular story, Kentucky State Police Media Relations Branch Commander Lt. Phil Crumpton confirmed that there had been no reports of unwanted horses to either the headquarters or any of the regional posts. At the annual meeting of the Kentucky Animal Care and Control Association, the organization's president, Dan Evans, surveyed the membership about the situation. None reported an increase in reports or sightings of abandoned horses.

Whitfield is the principal sponsor of a House bill that will not only explicitly ban horse slaughter in the United States, but outlaw the transportation of horses out of the country if those animals are destined for the abattoir.

Whitfield may be correct about those herds of horses that haven't gained new members in Kentucky, but my original point still in my opinion remains valid: "Good intentions can have some awful consequences."

Who is going to take care of all these horses? Clearly, too many horses are being bred, and it's up to horse owners to solve the problem. Breeding fewer horses is a good place to start. Now that American horse slaughter is almost certainly a thing of the past--the horse lovers got their wish--it's up to them to tend to the results of their efforts.

One more thing. Although I don't know how widespread the problem is, horse theft, or if you prefer, horse rustling, is still happening. Horse lovers claim that many of the stolen equines end up at slaughterhouses. That might be true, but it's hard to believe that most of the horses that were slaughtered at the nation's last horse meat processing plant--1,000 of them went through its doors each week--were rustled.

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