A Good Week for Horses
(AP)
That’s the bad news in the horse world. The good news is that it has been a remarkable week for opponents of the barbaric practice of horse slaughter in this country. From Texas, where two slaughter plants were forced to remain closed, to Illinois, where Governor Rod Blagojevich signed into law a measure making it illegal in that state to slaughter horses for human consumption. The new statute in Illinois effectively shuts down the third and last plant in the country that dedicated its operations to killing our horses to sell as food for humans in other countries.
Neither the United States Supreme Court, which turned down an appeal by the Texas slaughterers, nor the Texas legislature, which tabled a bill that might have allowed the plants to re-open, was willing to ride to the rescue of a practice that seems out of a different time and certainly out of place for a nation founded, for the most part, on horse back. And even from Congress the recent news is good. The American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act was voted out of committee in the Senate—last term it passed in the House of Representatives—and should actually become the law of the land before the current legislative session ends in 2009.
