Horse Slaughterhouses In US Legal, Horse Meat Bill Would Ban Them
Horse slaughterhouses in the United States are still legal to this day, but a bill in Congress would stop the production of horsemeat.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, horsemeat burgers officially became legal again in 2011.
Since then we’ve discovered horse slaughterhouses have been serving up our meals at schools, Burger King, and Taco Bell (but we all knew that was coming, right?). But the Federal spending bill released on Monday includes a section that pulls the funding for health inspectors at equine facilities, which would indirectly, albeit effectively, put an end to all American horse slaughterhouses.
Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States, says horse slaughterhouses in the US should have been banned long ago:
“Americans do not want to see scarce tax dollars used to oversee an inhumane, disreputable horse slaughter industry. We don’t have dog and cat slaughter plants in the U.S. catering to small markets overseas, and we shouldn’t have horse slaughter operations for that purpose, either.”
Proponents of allowing US horse slaughterhouses claim there will be a loss to jobs and a hit to the economy due to the closing of an export market. Native American tribes claim rising horse populations in the wild are destroying their range lands and want the horse slaughterhouses to remain open. Also, even if the American locations are closed that means the production of horse meat will simply be outsourced to Mexico and Canada
But just how dangerous is horse meat to human consumption? Doctors claim an anti-inflammatory drug called phenylbutazone, or ‘bute,’ may be contained in some race horses due to its effectiveness in treating horse pain. However, bute is a carcinogen and is strongly linked with bone marrow and liver problems in humans. According to the Food and Chemical Toxicology, it’s so dangerous the FDA banned its use in animals intended for human consumption because the drug “causes serious and lethal idiosyncratic adverse effects in humans.”
Do you think horse slaughterhouses in the US should remain open? How do you feel about eating horsemeat?
