By John Hanchette
OLEAN -- For a while, this newspaper
was one of the lonely few covering the fervid national debate over horses and
whether they are just livestock and food for foreigners, or something more
respected and treasured in American culture. Now, reporters and columnists all
over the country are weighing in on the issue, and Congress took up the matter
last week.
As usual, Congress
screwed it up beyond belief.
Here's an update. Three
Belgian-owned horse-killing plants -- two in Texas and one in Illinois --
slaughter about 95,000 American horses a year, mostly for export to Japan and
several European countries, where the flesh is considered a delicacy and goes at
retail for about $15 to $23 a pound.
The horses destined for
foreign dinner plates often sell at auction in this country for as little as 40
cents a pound, some of which trickles down to naive farmers, ranchers and pet
owners who are frequently told their beloved animal is going to some green
retirement pasture instead of into a catchment system that ends up in a killing
plant. More often, the horse owner can't afford to feed the old horse anymore,
or can't handle the zooming veterinary bills, or buys into the spurious
descriptions of the killing process as humane, and sends the horse off with a
soothed conscience and thoughts of painless euthanasia. More on that
gullibility and rationalization in a bit.
When you get that kind
of a profit spread described above, you know someone is going to fight to keep
the system going -- and the three foreign-owned slaughterhouses have and are.
Collectively, they sold about $60 million worth of horsemeat for foreign
consumption last year.
The House and Senate
are scheduled to vote soon on a bill that would make such slaughter permanently
illegal -- a vote which probably will occur during the first week of September
when members of Congress return from their August recess vacations.
The bill enjoys
bipartisan support in both chambers, has 201 co-sponsors in the House and is
mirrored by a companion bill in the Senate, primarily sponsored by Republican
senator John Ensign of Nevada, a veterinarian himself.
The House version of
the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act progressed nicely through the House
Energy and Commerce Committee last week, but then was hijacked by the chairman
of the House Agriculture Committee, Virginia Republican Bob Goodlatte -- who is
vigorously opposed to the slaughter ban.
Goodlatte's panel reported
the bill out to the House floor -- a seeming victory for its backers -- but did
what congressional committees often do when they want to confuse the public.
The panel loaded up the proposal with "poison pill" amendments,
killer changes in obtuse language that make a hash of the original intent and
usually doom the legislation to defeat or terminal delays.
Now, the House Rules
Committee must decide if members get to vote on the original bill, consider a
substitute bill without the killer amendments, amend the bill on the floor, or
decide on the Goodlatte version with all its clever baggage. The House bill's
authors -- Republican representatives John Sweeney of New York and Ed Whitfield
of Kentucky -- contend they have been promised a straight up-or-down floor vote
on the original bill without amendments. The promise maker is the one who
decides: House Majority Leader John Boehner, a Republican from Ohio. We shall
see.
The House Ag amendments
make that tampered-with version generally unpalatable to original backers. One
would require the Department of Agriculture (which routinely thumbs its nose at
congressional intent on this issue) to pay America's horse owners for the cost
of euthanizing their unwanted animals if slaughter is deemed illegal. This, it
is estimated, would cost the American taxpayer about $160 million a year and
prompt howls of fiscal outrage.
Another is a
premeditated thumb in the eye of the sponsors. Under a so-called "pilot
program," it would limit the slaughter ban to two states -- New York and
Kentucky, where Sweeney and Whitfield are from. Sweeney's district includes
Saratoga horse country, where the venerable and famous upstate thoroughbred
racing meet is taking place as you read this.
Goodlatte even twisted
the knife a bit in commenting about the two-state amendment.
"If some people
think the bill does (have merit)," he said after the hearing, "they
can try it out in two states of two proponents of the legislation."
There are currently no
horse slaughter plants in New York or Kentucky. So the amendment is meaningless
except for Goodlatte's intended message: Don't screw with me.
Another amendment would
"grandfather" the three existing plants as legal -- exempting them
from shutting down no matter what law was passed -- effectively obliterating
the primary intent of the legislation in the first place. Yet another venomous
change in the original bill would exempt from the slaughter ban horses that
would be killed for "charitable of humanitarian relief purposes."
That one is a beauty,
and testimony to the ingenuity of nameless congressional committee staffers who
draft legislation for a living. All the Belgian owners of the killing factories
would have to do is throw a few bucks a year to United Way or some American
humane society and claim the money came in part from all the horses slaughtered
annually, no matter how minutely fractional. Bingo, they're exempt from the
killing ban.
The agriculture panel
hearing itself was stacked from the get-go. All witnesses in front of the House
Ag panel opposed the bill. Goodlatte blithely told the press he received no
requests to testify from backers of the legislation. Proponents point out it is
House tradition and practice that witnesses from both sides of an issue be
invited to testify, and no proponents were.
One of those who did
testify at the House Ag hearing was prominent veterinarian Bonnie Beaver,
former president of the powerful American Veterinary Medical Association and
now a professor in Texas A & M University's College of Medicine. She is
opposed to the slaughter ban. She claims it "does not address the disposal
of more than 90,000 horse carcasses (a year) if horse slaughter is
banned."
She said backers are
making this into an "emotional" issue instead of offering solutions
to "the problems that would be created."
In the furtherance of
the concept of full disclosure, it should be noted that the two Texas plants --
Beltex and Dallas Crown -- pay $5 per slaughtered horse to two recipient
organizations: $3 to the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association and
$2 to the Texas A & M Cooperative Extension for its stolen horse prevention
and education program. That's worth about $135,000 a year to Texas A & M
alone. Excuse me for going hmmnnnn.
Emotions, indeed.
There was a bit of good
news for the bill's proponents. Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens -- who
routinely gives impressive sums to conservative Republican candidates --
appeared at the Energy and Commerce panel to support the slaughter ban and to
declare the killing, which he termed America's "dirty little secret,"
is also harmful because it "cuts against our moral and cultural
fiber."
"This is a black
eye on our state and nation that demands action," said Pickens, who neatly
blew up the argument that most of the killed horses are old, lame, diseased and
starving anyway. The USDA, noted Pickens, has described most (90-plus percent)
of the horses who are butchered in the three plants as in "good to
excellent condition."
"This is all about
making money," continued the blunt-talking Pickens. "The kill plants
are here in the United States to make money for people in Europe. They should
slaughter their own horses, not American horses."
Some of the testifiers
last week were downright arrogant. Douglas Corey, the incoming president of the
American Association of Equine Practitioners who argued for free trade and
property rights, was dismissive of numerous polls that show about 90 percent of
Americans oppose horse slaughter.
"The general
public does not know equine," he sniffed.
Well, apparently
Congress doesn't "know equine" either. When an amendment to ban horse
slaughter for one fiscal year by defunding specific health inspectors came up
for a vote, it passed in the House 269-158 and in the Senate 69-28. The
connivers in the U.S. Department of Agriculture got around that by letting the
foreign horse killers pay for their own meat inspections, but that doesn't
change the numbers.
Another argument that
proponents of the trio of abattoirs use is continuance of employment. Think of
the hundreds of jobs that will be lost, they wail.
Where were they when
our federal leaders shipped all those steelworker jobs in Buffalo and
Pittsburgh to Japan in the name of globalization and free trade? Where were
they when New England and Carolina textile jobs went to slave-labor sweatshops
abroad so some multi-national firms could get rich? Where were they when the
air conditioner plants bailed to foreign climes in the name of net profit?
Where are they when they let oppressed foreign workers making pennies an hour
produce apparel that can be labeled "Made in USA" after a few
remaining stitches are added back in this country? Get real. Don't insult us.
Another argument routinely
repeated by members of the agriculture panel is the "humane" process
used in killing the horses. I will not describe it here, for reasons of space
and taste -- but most of you are reading this on a computer, or at least know
how to use the Internet. Telling pictures are readily available. Go to your
screens and access one of the following web sites to view what I'm talking
about: www.savethehorses.com, or www.saplonline.org, or www.usesr.org, or www.kaufmanzoning.net.
Then tell me you'd like
to see your aging dog or cat put down that way.
The last thing I'll
mention is the deliberate smokescreen that horse slaughter advocates are
blowing around -- vegetarianism. House Ag chairman Goodlatte stated it outright
last week: "This bill is part of a larger agenda for the animal rights
activists, an agenda against all of agriculture."
He and other opponents
apparently believe passage would lead to subsequent bans on slaughter of pigs,
cows, chickens and other yummy barnyard creatures.
This odd and misleading
view is also held locally. Some guy from Grand Island tore me apart in a letter
to the editor three weeks ago, claiming my opposition to horse slaughter stems
from a vegetarian agenda I must hold and sarcastically advising that I should
instead express agony for plant souls each time I chomp down on a bean, or
kernel of corn, or carrot stick. Let me clear something up. I am not a
vegetarian.
I eat pork. I eat
chicken. I eat goose. I eat duck. I eat deer. I eat fish. I eat cute little
rabbits. I eat cute little lambs. I eat cow.
I don't eat horse.
John
Hanchette, a professor of journalism at St. Bonaventure University, is a former
editor of the Niagara Gazette and a Pulitzer Prize-winning national
correspondent. He was a founding editor of USA Today and was recently
named by Gannett as one of the Top 10 reporters of the past 25 years. He can be
contacted via e-mail at Hanchette6@aol.com.
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