A clarification to the correction
Jul 14, 2008
By Steve Cornett
What we have learned since this blog started is there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time Googling or RSSing horse slaughter stories and tirading away on the writers.
This is one way, and those of us in agriculture should learn, a committed few can sound like a movement.
Several have found us, and we have their thoughts to consider.
A couple of the questions need to be addressed.
Respondent LRS is correct. I should have said “convinced the House of Representatives” to outlaw horse slaughter for human consumption. The House passed the bill, but it was blocked in the Senate.
That would not take R-E-S-E-A-R-C-H because I covered it at the time. It would take memory. However, alas, I had filed it away in my brain as de jure rather than the de facto it is because the “some states” that have banned horse slaughter for human consumption include Texas and Illinois which are the only states that had plants.
So the folks in this movement have managed to get horse slaughter effectively banned in the U.S. There are no slaughter plants. The horses are shipped to other countries if they have enough flesh on them to pay freight.
As to why it is important to beef producers. First, most have a nag or two. Second, a lot of us see this as a slippery slope in America’s core ontology: Today they came for my horse; Tomorrow they come for my cow.
If you guys can convince our legislators that it is somehow morally wrong for humans to eat horse meat, how long before the full vegans succeed in instituting their own set of blue laws?
A lot of us, Neanderthal though it be, think of horses as property. We think we should be allowed to market our property as we wish so long as it doesn’t negatively impact another human. That would, again, be “human,” a separate and, many of us believe, special, species.
We think if you don’t want me to kill and eat my horse or sell it to some unenlightened European, you should provide what the constitution, Neanderthal though it be, refers to as “just compensation” which would best be determined in an auction with all bidders.
To put that a bit more succinctly, get some money from Willie and Bo, latch onto some of PETA’s $30 million a year and a little bit of the $80 million HSUS rakes in, and outbid the packer buyers. Buy your rich, caring selves a ranch, and put them there.
They could frolic.
