Slippery Slopes

As much as I’d like to laugh at the foibles of other nations’ animal cruelty policies, we in the USA have little room to talk.

Since Congress banned the domestic slaughter of horses several years ago, the lower end of the horse market has collapsed. People stopped selling marginal horses, although they certainly didn’t start feeding them. Thus a drive along back roads in the Midwest, Great Plains, or Rocky Mountain states will expose fields full of skinny, untrained, low-value horses. (Actually, last year’s weather over much of this range was unusually favorable for hay and grass stocks, which mitigated this somewhat. We can’t really expect that pattern to continue, and this winter may have canceled it out anyway.) In contrast to the regulated, now-shuttered American plants, one can only imagine the conditions for those truly valueless individuals that are shipped long distances to processors in Mexico. The economic consequences have cascaded upward, as trainers, consignors, farriers, etc. at all levels have had to adjust to smaller markets for all things equine.

None of this surprises anyone with a rudimentary understanding of economics, which is why e.g. veterinarians were and are overwhelmingly against the slaughter ban. Now the animal “welfare” activists are talking about even more draconian regulations, apparently oblivious to the extant effects of their moral vanity. Our horse slaughter ban evokes nothing so much as India’s cattle laws. As anyone who has been to India and seen the starving feral cattle living like pitiful stray dogs could tell you, this is not a flattering comparison.