Horse****!!

Ha. Not what you think. Horse meat is a commodity getting attention these days because many pet horses are being sold at auctions that owners think are for pets to go to new owners, but actually go to the slaughterhouse. Estimates range in the neighborhood of one hundred thousand a year, with most going to Mexico, Canada or Europe. In these places the horses are killed and butchered for human or pet food. They are not treated kindly.
So who is to blame for this? Indiscriminate pet breeders “Oh, let’s have our mare have a baby so we can have a colt to raise honey.” is commonly heard around pet horse owners. Then the feed and vet bill goes up and “bingo” the horse gets auctioned. And race horse breeders contribute to the problem by breeding and selecting for the best runners and trashing the rest.
The whole thing turns on two things: Any animal raised to be a pet will get really traumatized if treated like a food animal. Horses included. They get easily terrified and being loaded in trucks with prods, trucked thousands of miles, unloaded in chutes and killed is at best awful and at worst unspeakably cruel. The second is the unwillingness of Americans to view horses as food animals. Most of the rest of the world is quite happy serving horse meat as a normal part of the diet. Yummy. What could be better than a nice juicy horse tenderloin, lightly grilled to a warm pink and served with a good Cabernet? See? You think that is a sick thing even to suggest. But face it folks. Horses are animals like cattle and have a lot of meat on them. Why not eat them? If the raising and slaughter of horses was regulated, humane treatment would be more likely, and a growing number of horse lovers (for meat, not riding) would add to a new commerce. Then all you southerners that have a pet horse or two could actually have a reason for keeping the nags. And make a few dollars as well.
The killing floors of horse slaughter plants are awful places, but outlawing horse slaughter in America won’t solve the problem in Mexico or Canada or France. Regulating the trade makes more sense to me. The other issue is what to do with the 100’s of thousands of horses bred every year, if the meat trade is cut off? Every day starving horses are dumped at humane shelters throughout the country. To get killed and either buried or burned. They die more quietly, but after months or years of abuse. If all the rednecks that breed horses and all the racehorse owners that breed horses could be convinced to back off, that would be a good start to actually solving the problem. The other is to let McDonald’s server “Trigger Burgers”.
Image: http://www.looking-glass.co.uk/news/library2004/2004-6-greek-strays-photos.htm