You may be a top contributor in the "Dogs" and "Pregnancy" categories, but it's obvious that you know nothing about horses or about the current situation with regard to slaughter in the United states. If you did know anything, you would know that the sale of horse meat for human consumption is prohibited by law in all 50 states, and that it was the STATES ( not the federal government as many would believe) which actually outlawed horse slaughter by creating a political and legal climate in which the companies that ran the plants couldn't operate. It's true that Congress voted to defund the federal inspection program for slaughterhouse that process horsemeat in 2005- and up until this past November, they voted down every annual request for funding to restart the program. But during this past fall somehow, a whole lot of people managed to convince Congress that restarting the inspection program with taxpayers' money was the most cost effective way to deal with what most people think of as a serious equine overpopulation problem. What they didn't want to recognize is that bringing back slaughter alone WON'T SOLVE the problem, period- and what most Americans ( whether horseloving or not) have also failed to realize is that restarting the federal horse slaughter plant inspection program is going to cost us ALL a lot of money. Right now, federal and state laws prohibit the sale of horse meat either inside or outside the USA without an inspection to be sure the meat is safe for consumption. That simple fact has been what has stopped the slaughter plant companies ( most of which have headquarters and owners that are based in Europe, not here) from operating or attempting to operate in the US- and believe me, the news that they can now operate legally here has been a huge boon to them. The only thing they need to do is build their plants and get them opened and operating- the US government will provide the inspectors for the meat so they can export and sell it, and send the profits home to their countries of origin.
These companies don't even have to worry about paying for the inspections- the American taxpayers are going to be doing that for them. They don't have to pay licensing fees, either. No, they won't be able to sell their product in the US proper because that'll be illegal, but then again, they don't need to, because there's a HUGE demand for American horsemeat in the rest of the world outside our borders. It's considered a delicacy in Europe and in much of Asia, and there are plenty of countries in the world where it actually replaces beef as a protein source, in fact. The major reason why these foreign owned slaughter plant companies want to set up shop in the US is because they have contracts with meat buyers outside our borders that need to be fulfilled and lived up to- and because the worldwide demand for horse meat is so huge, they naturally need to find ways to supply it. Since the countries in Europe and Asia can't possibly raise enough horses to meet the ever growing demand, the slaughter plant operators have turned to North America, and specifically the US, as a resource. As of this writing, there are plans in the works to build new slaughterhouses for horses in at least 6 US states, and possibly more. All the owners were waiting for was the green light from Congress and the president, and they've gotten that now. So in light of all this, I ask you whether or not you think this is an acceptable way for the US government to do business. I don't. Prior to 2007, when the last remaining slaughter houses that accepted horsemeat closed down, the federal inspection program was costing American taxpayers about 5 million dollars a year to run- with most of that coming out of the USDA's budget. Meanwhile, the companies that ran the plants were making annual profits of nearly 5 times that amount, and since they were foreign based, they were sending it home tax free. Take a moment now and think about what will happen once the new slaughter houses are built and operating. There will be at least half a dozen of them, maybe more, as I mentioned- and if you take that 2007 figure of five million and multiply it by six, you get 30 million, which is not exactly chump change. And while all this is going on, and Americans are paying through the nose for the inspections, the plant owners will be making millions of dollars in profits once again. THIS is MY MAIN OBJECTION to the new slaughter law. It isn't so much that I oppose slaughter as a whole- I consider it to be a necessary evil- so much that I object to the incredibly misguided way in which the president and Congress have chosen to handle this situation.