National
The Humane Society of the United States praises the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) for rejecting a proposed resolution that would have supported the slaughter of American horses for human consumption overseas. The NCSL’s Agriculture, Environment and Energy Committee rejected the horse slaughter proposal at its meeting this past weekend in Washington, D.C.
The resolution, introduced by Rep. Dave Sigdestad of South Dakota, would have called for NSCL to publicly oppose a federal bill to protect horses from slaughter, the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act (H.R. 503/S. 311). State lawmakers, however, have been actively working to protect horses from slaughter. State laws in Texas and Illinois bar the slaughter of horses and were upheld by federal courts last year, and just this year, South Dakota rejected a bill to fund a horse slaughter plant with tax dollars. Other states like Arizona, California and Oklahoma have laws on the books dealing with horse slaughter.
“Americans don’t eat horse meat, and not a single state has an operating horse slaughter plant that supplies foreign gourmands with this delicacy,” said Michael Markarian, executive vice president of The HSUS. “By slaughtering this wrongheaded resolution, NCSL has sided with citizens in every state who want this American icon to be protected from a grim and painful end.”
All three foreign-owned horse slaughter plants in the U.S. have been shuttered. However, tens of thousands of American horses are still exported to Mexico and Canada for slaughter. H.R. 503/S. 311 would prevent horse slaughter from resuming in the U.S. and also would prohibit the live export of horses for slaughter in other countries.
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