Subject: [againstslaughter] My letter to the
Rockbridge weekly (final)
My name is John Holland, and I am referenced in Patte Wood's
article of 30 June about the Goodlatte town hall meeting of the 28th.
Patte correctly states that I handed Bob a memo that he had sent to
"colleagues" asking for their support in defeating H.R.857 (The ban on
horse slaughter for human consumption), but I am afraid Patte did not make clear
my whole purpose in doing so, nor the true import of the memo.
First, Bob had just claimed that the bill did not have sufficient support in the
House Agricultural Committee, as if he as the Chairman of this committee was not
responsible for the bill being trapped there. The memo clearly shows that
he is actively campaigning to get support that he can hide behind in blocking
the bill. If what he had said to the previous question had been true, and
if there had not been support for the bill, then why would he be actively
campaigning for support in blocking it? In fact, three of his
committee members pulled their support at the "request of the
Chairman."
Secondly, Patte basically paraphrases the memo without challenging the utterly
ridiculous claims it contains. The first claim is about all the
organizations that oppose H.R.857. Most of the organizations are meat
producers, some are poultry related, and a few are legitimate horse
organizations. Members of those horse organizations were present at the
meeting and adamantly stated that they were not being represented by their
leadership and had not been polled about their positions. Clearly this is
a case of powerful people throwing their support around and making it appear
they represent the rank and file of their organizations.
Next the memo says that if the slaughter ends, the 50,000 horses being killed
annually will be "surplus" and will fall into situations of abuse and
neglect. Many of these horses were stolen, sold under false pretences or are
federally protected wild horses. They would simply stay where they were
intended to be. The "abuse and neglect" argument allows Bob to
pretend to be concerned about horses. Bob's record shows that he has never
supported any legislation that would have protected any group of animals except
for the bill aimed at stopping the transport of fighting animals such as cocks
and Pit Bulls. The reason he supported that bill had nothing to do with
the cruelty involved, but rather his conviction against gambling.
The fact is that horse slaughter is abuse. Bob has admitted that he knows
the horses being slaughtered are mostly young and in good health. These
horses could easily be absorbed into the horse community. The horses in
need of rescue are the old and the infirm, and the slaughterhouses do not want
those animals. The on-line price list for horses posted by one of the
Texas slaughterhouses clearly shows that they do not want skinny or old horses.
The proof that Bob's claims are false is everywhere.
In Illinois, the abuse rate quit climbing and began to decrease when the Cavel
slaughter plant burned. Two weeks earlier, when confronted with this and
other statistical disproof of his claims, Bob had admitted in front of 600
people that he had not looked at the statistics! Monday, Bob waved his
Blackberry and said he had found statistical proof that abuse had doubled, but I
have since emailed his staff the statistics and our source (Lydia F. Gray, DVM,
MA, Executive Director, Hoofed Animal Humane Society). I have yet to hear
back with his "proof" to the contrary.
The next paragraph of the memo is yet more ridiculous, and is a clumsy attempt
at scare tactics. It states that these unwanted horses will need to be
rescued by the government at a cost that will eventually reach half a billion
dollars. I presented a graph showing the slaughter declining from 348,000
in 1989 to under 50,000 last year. If, as Bob contends in the memo, these
horses were all at risk of abuse and neglect, then what happened to the
3,067,719 "excess" horses that should have needed federal assistance
by now? I asked where the government was keeping these horses and what it
was costing the taxpayers.
Bob talked circuitously about 1989 being a peak year from which there has since
been a decline. At the end of this "explanation" we were somehow
to believe that the first 300,000 horses being slaughtered per year were
different than the last 50,000! There was not a shred of substance or
logic involved in his response. Federal tax money has never been
used for warehousing surplus horses and H.R.857 asks for no such funding at all!
If these horses were surplus, the killer buyers would not bid against good
owners at auctions to get them!
Finally, the last paragraph of representative Goodlatte's memo is the most
egregious of all. He quotes the Humane Society of the United States as if
they agreed with his position. The HSUS is one of Bob's harshest critics!
They are outraged by this misstatement of their position!
As Patte observed, when asked what we had to do to get H.R.857 out of his
committee, Bob Goodlatte said we would have to convince him and that we had not
done so! This directly contradicted his first statement of the evening in
which he claimed a lack of support in the committee as the reason for the bill
being stalled! An independent poll now shows three out of four Virginians
favor ending horse slaughter, but that is incredibly not enough to
"convince" Bob Goodlatte!
What all the reporters failed to note was what really took place in that
meeting. Someone asked what kind of democracy we had if one man could not
only ignore his own constituents, but block the will of the whole country? To
this Bob said "This isn't a democracy, it is a republic." In
actual fact, on this issue the country is functioning as neither a democracy nor
a republic, but rather as a dictatorship.
This is about much more than horses. This is about whether we have any say in
our governance. Monday night we witnessed a flagrant abuse of power and it
was largely ignored by the press. Let me close with a warning from a truly
great Virginian:
"When the representative body have lost the confidence of their
constituents, when they have notoriously made sale of their most valuable
rights, when they have assumed to themselves powers which the people never put
into their hands, then, indeed, their continuing in office becomes dangerous to
the State, and calls for an exercise of the power of dissolution." --Thomas
Jefferson: Rights of British America, 1774.