Slaughter horse horror: animal wrongs.

• Author: Riggs, Mike
• Position: Citings

ANIMAL RIGHTS activists seemed to score a major victory in 2006 when they pressured Congress to de fund the federal agency responsible for inspecting horse-slaughter factories. The reasoning was that without Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspectors, the slaughterhouses couldn't slaughter, so no more horse meat could be shipped from the U.S. to countries where it is consumed by humans. Two slaughter factories in Texas and one in Illinois kept operating by paying for USDA inspections until 2007, when new state laws shut them down. Domestic slaughter of horses came to an end.

Four years and one Government Accountability Office (GAO) report later, however, the de facto ban looks like anything but a victory for equine enthusiasts. Shortly after the last U.S. slaughter factories closed, the bottom dropped out of the horse market. The high cost of shipping horses outside the U.S. to slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada reduced the amount a slaughter horse could fetch at auction. In turn, the number of domestic horse shipping companies and horse auctions decreased by more than half.

This created a new problem. When the GAO interviewed state veterinarians for a...