A strong statement there, and I’d have to agree, under these guidelines, it is going to be impossible for vets to properly enforce these regulations. Especially with slaughter horses coming from all over the country, without paperwork, ad without ID. In Colorado, an out of state horse doesn’t need a coggins test to be sold or shipped again out of state if it’s slaughterbound. They are unknown animals…
WOW!
Hope this doesn’t snow ball into a new tracking/passport system.
You can’t blame this one on the anti-slaughter folks.
The horsies could be happily slaughtered in the US without tracking…
yes, I know, happy and slaughter does not go well together, but you know what I mean.
Who would they sell the meat to?
The US plants used to sell to the EU as well and would have to meet the same regulations.
Bravo to this. I can’t believe our own government has allowed this for so long. It is a disgrace.
Thanks for posting that.
It does not matter where they are slaughtered…if the meat is going to the EU, it will have to meet the same restrictions for drug withholding or quarantine. No matter how it works otherwise from this point forward, or where they go to be slaughtered, that is going to be in effect assuming they buying market is the EU.
Perhaps people will finally wake up to the fact that horse slaughter is driven by DEMAND for meat, not “excess” horses here in the US, and that includes now any restrictions placed on that meat as well. So the demand will be for “clean” horsemeat only.
In September of last year we “rescued” a 20 year old Tb stallion site unseen from a feed lot. I paid $820 for him and the shipper that picked him up called me and said, “I dont think he’s going to make the trip…he’s in bad shape.” We took our time bringing him from South Dakota…let him rest several times on the trip. He arrived…all 16 hands of him weighing in at 623 pounds. It’s been touch and go all winter with him and he still needs a good 100 pounds, but the sad part is…this is a well bred…money winning, stakes producing stallion that got lost in the shuffle in a business gone belly up.
I am the first to go broke “saving” a horse…and I am angry with the amount of horses that are thrown away every year because they are not useful…but at the same time…I certainly can not save them all. NONE of us can…even though we would all like to.
These unwanted horses suffer, starve, are neglected and forgotten about…even if they are blue blood, money producing winners…so what happens with the slaughter houses shut down…we find 40-50-60 horses at a time walking bones and stepping over dead herd mates trying to survive.
Is slaughter the answer…hell no…but until there is some sort of regulation put on mass “puppy mill” breeding…we have a choice…let the unwanted horses suffer and starve to death…or give them some sort of ending to a horrible outcome.
I hate seeing the pics of how the slaughter horses are treated…I hate the fact that they even ended up there in the first place. But the buck STOPS at the breeder…for the handful of good ones…look at the hundreds of thousands of bad ones.
IMO when I breed my mare…I’m in it for the long haul. I made that choice to breed the mare…and if the foal is a dud…it is my responibility as the owner to give it a life home, find it a life home, or put it to sleep…(i’ve never had to do that…but I am trying to make a point)
Heck, I had one born last year from an “adpoted” mare…that was born with three crooked legs…he got all the right stuff done to him…and my highest hopes for him this whole time…that he will die happy of old age in my pasture.
Breed responsibly…stop “puppy mill” production…and we wont need slaughter houses.
I truly don’t think that it matters whether a certain drug is allowed in cattle and not in a horse. It isn’t what we think–it’s what the EU policy thinks, and they are the one buying this “meat on the hoof.”
And, to tell the truth, they (EU) don’t really need U.S. horses–or Canadian horses, for that matter. They export much more tonnage of meat from many of the South American countries to Europe, and probably don’t have to bother as much about drug contamination. The U.S. market is relatively small potatoes compared to what is produced and sent to Europe and Asia from elsewhere.
The only logical solution for the EU would seem to raise some horses specifically for the slaughter market. The others would seem to be more trouble than they are worth. JMO…
[QUOTE=betonbill;4734774]
I truly don’t think that it matters whether a certain drug is allowed in cattle and not in a horse. It isn’t what we think–it’s what the EU policy thinks, and they are the one buying this “meat on the hoof.”
And, to tell the truth, they (EU) don’t really need U.S. horses–or Canadian horses, for that matter. They export much more tonnage of meat from many of the South American countries to Europe, and probably don’t have to bother as much about drug contamination. The U.S. market is relatively small potatoes compared to what is produced and sent to Europe and Asia from elsewhere.
The only logical solution for the EU would seem to raise some horses specifically for the slaughter market. The others would seem to be more trouble than they are worth. JMO…[/QUOTE]
Horses are raised for food by some farms in the EU! I find it amazing how long it took the EU to wake up to the fact that they were allowing the importation of meat that they restrict their own people from selling.
IMO, the real way to stop horse slaughter is to stop breeding so many horses.
The breed assocs. are more at fault than those goons who have a mare and figure they might as well breed her to the neighbor’s stallion, and the goons are bad enough.
Well this is quite the zombie thread. Raised from the dead from over five years ago.
[QUOTE=LexInVA;4725840]
Does this mean that horses will now be fed to the mutant Grizzly-Polar Bear hybrids that you are secretly mass producing in Canada in an attempt to create a trained army of Bears that will invade the US? Colbert wants to know…[/QUOTE]
Does Colbert know about these? http://www.democraticunderground.com/1018219145
G.
