Congress Must Include a Comprehensive Ban on Horse Slaughter in Farm Bill

With lawmakers in Congress set to complete work on the Farm Bill in the coming months, it’s our moment to pass legislation to ban the slaughter of American horses for the meat trade. This includes halting live exports of horses for slaughter to Canada and Mexico. Achieving this long-sought aspiration requires that a set of independent-minded horse advocates subordinate their quarrels with other groups and their quibbles about legislative language and unite with a shared purpose to protect our American equines.

Decades ago, there were more than two dozen U.S. horse slaughter plants, perhaps chewing up more than a million equines a year, whether wild horses rounded up from public lands in the West, racehorses walked right off the track and into a kill buyer’s truck, or pleasure or working horses picked up at auctions for a pittance. In 1990, kill buyers shuttled 400,000 horses to slaughter, with the carnage divvied up by those plant operators in the United States as well as those in Canada and Mexico.

It was always an export commodity, even decades ago. Horse meat never figured prominently on the American menu, with hippophagy reserved for extremes like the Donner party’s harrowing passage over the Sierras or other circumstances driven by human desperation.

Though there were always Americans who pitied the horses funneled to slaughter, no single organization sustained a sophisticated political effort to end the practice. But a political movement to end the practice did emerge in the 1990s, and combined with the pet food industry and foreign markets demonstrating concerns about drug residues in horse meat, there’s been progress. Today, the horse slaughter enterprise has become a shadow of what it once was.

In 2006, Congress took action to defund USDA inspections of horse slaughter plants and, coincident with that effort, states and federal courts took actions that resulted in closures of the three remaining plants in Illinois and Texas. Since then, Congress has shut the door on horse-slaughter start-ups.

Unfortunately, a small though determined group of lawmakers, lobbied by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, have been able to block the ban on live exports of equines to Canada and Mexico. It’s now time to swat away the arguments from trade groups whose positions may have been debatable 30 years ago but no longer apply today.

The number of equines exported for foreign slaughter has dropped from upwards of 400,000 in 1990 to just a comparative trickle, with roughly 20,000 exported in 2022. New York Governor Kathy Hochul is set to sign comprehensive anti-slaughter legislation in New York. With that law, we’ll have four of America’s five biggest states — California, Illinois, Texas, and now New York — forbidding slaughter.

Though horse-slaughter commerce is negligible, what remains of the enterprise still fills the eyes of thousands of horses with terror. The Center for a Humane Economy, Animal Wellness Action and Animals’ Angels documented this terror in a national investigation into the trade released earlier this year. Our report shows once-healthy horses who were denied food, water, and veterinary care; injured during handling or transport; held in overcrowded pens where viruses such as strangles run amok; and left exposed with no shelter against the bitter winds of Canadian winter. 

Must-Pass Farm Bill Provides a Pathway for Final Action on SAFE Act

The Save America’s Forgotten Equines (SAFE) Act, led by Sens. Robert Menendez, D-N.J. and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. and Reps. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., and Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., seeks to end all of this. It would do so by revising the 2018 Dog and Cat Meat Trade Prohibition Act, passed as an amendment to the 2018 Farm Bill, and adding “equines” to the prohibition against companion animal slaughter.

Some horse advocates have voiced concerns, however, that the SAFE Act isn’t strong enough, suggesting there are loopholes for slaughter for animal consumption and for Native American tribes.

Those fears are unwarranted. The pet food industry is not going down to add horse meat to its ingredient list for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that horse meat is laced with toxic residues. And the zoo industry demand is small (just for big cats) and there are big-cat feeds that are already widely used that do not rely on horse meat at all.

Because animals sold for pet food are likely to yield far lower prices than animals destined for human consumption, it’s just not profitable for kill buyers to trade in them, even if that demand did exist. And while it’s true that there are pet food companies in Canada in the vicinity of the Richelieu plant in Quebec, those companies are purchasing byproducts from animals already slaughtered for human consumption. There are no horses slaughtered exclusively for pet food or for zoos. Slaughtering horses for those purposes is not a stand-alone business.

Nevertheless, we support the idea of strengthening the SAFE Act to ensure that the law will put an end to any trafficking of live horses to Canada or Mexico for slaughter for any purpose. The key now is to secure a place for the SAFE Act in the Farm Bill, and then to perfect the Farm Bill at the end of the process.

It has likewise been suggested that an exemption in the dog and cat meat law providing for native tribes engaging in religious ceremonies might be exploited by pro-slaughter tribes to engage in large-scale commercial slaughter for human or pet food. The exemption in question, however, states only that slaughter is allowed “for purposes of a religious ceremony.” It is impossible to imagine a religious ceremony tied to walking thousands of horses into transport trucks bound for slaughter plants in Canada or Mexico. That would be a transparent violation of the law.

No horse deserves this fate—which is why animal advocates must sideline
their differences and unite behind the SAFE Act.