One small step at a time. I always like to point out that if someone proposed to open a dog slaughter house "To humanely eliminate excess, unwanted pets" and ship the meat to Korea and Vietnam, they would be shown the door in a hurry as someone went to procure the boiling oil, or the tar and feathers.
Yet Americans continue to tolerate or even believe the argument that slaughter houses are humane ways to "put down" unwanted horses. The argument is absurd, especially if you see how it is done. There is nothing humane about it. We suffer from the problem that most of the US population lives in cities now and never even comes near a horse, never sees one except in a parade or on television, and has no sense of the depth of emotion and intelligence that horses have. To them, a horse is the size of a cow, lives on farms, and is just another kind of farm animal.
The truth is, horses have been bred and selected for millennia to be servants to humans. They are among the most intelligent and reasoning of domestic animals, perhaps surpassed only by the dog and cat. They have long memories, can generalize from specifics the same way a dog can, and experience emotional bonds and grief as well as primitive fear. And like dogs and cats, no horse is bred or born with the intention that it will become food. It takes a series of bad misfortunes to push a horse down that path, and all responsibility falls on us, the humans. The horse can never be blamed.
Horses that go to slaughter have been pets, riding horses, race horses, and otherwise servants to humankind. But when someone doesn't want to care for them any more, it is more profitable to sell their flesh for a few dollars than to find them a new home or pay to have them humanely put down and buried. To me, this is the same as deciding that an elderly relative isn't worth keeping any more so you sell them, still living and breathing, to a fertilizer plant to be ground up for lawn food.
Sorry, I know I tend to get on a soap box about this. It's a very emotional issue for me.
no subject
Yet Americans continue to tolerate or even believe the argument that slaughter houses are humane ways to "put down" unwanted horses. The argument is absurd, especially if you see how it is done. There is nothing humane about it. We suffer from the problem that most of the US population lives in cities now and never even comes near a horse, never sees one except in a parade or on television, and has no sense of the depth of emotion and intelligence that horses have. To them, a horse is the size of a cow, lives on farms, and is just another kind of farm animal.
The truth is, horses have been bred and selected for millennia to be servants to humans. They are among the most intelligent and reasoning of domestic animals, perhaps surpassed only by the dog and cat. They have long memories, can generalize from specifics the same way a dog can, and experience emotional bonds and grief as well as primitive fear. And like dogs and cats, no horse is bred or born with the intention that it will become food. It takes a series of bad misfortunes to push a horse down that path, and all responsibility falls on us, the humans. The horse can never be blamed.
Horses that go to slaughter have been pets, riding horses, race horses, and otherwise servants to humankind. But when someone doesn't want to care for them any more, it is more profitable to sell their flesh for a few dollars than to find them a new home or pay to have them humanely put down and buried. To me, this is the same as deciding that an elderly relative isn't worth keeping any more so you sell them, still living and breathing, to a fertilizer plant to be ground up for lawn food.
Sorry, I know I tend to get on a soap box about this. It's a very emotional issue for me.