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Horse bill off to a gallop — again |
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Posted: 04/23/07 09:41 PM [ET] |
Nancy Perry, lead lobbyist for the Humane Society of the United States, says one issue outrages her group’s 10 million members more than any other: the slaughter of horses for human food.
“It’s their top priority,” she said.
A grassroots call-in campaign was so successful last year that a few congressional offices asked Perry’s group to back off so that their phone lines could be used for other business, she said.
In what was one of the final votes of the Republican majority, the House ended up voting overwhelmingly last fall to ban the sale and transport of horses to meat processors, despite objections from the three U.S. factories that process horsemeat and a number of agriculture groups.
The Senate, though, recessed before taking up the bill, the latest frustration to animal-rights supporters who have come close to ending the sale of horsemeat only to be thwarted at the last minute.
A Republican lobbyist for the Society for Animal Protection Legislation, Chris Heyde, says the issue has broad support in both the House and the Senate, prompting his members to ask him: “What do you need to do to get something through Congress?”
Opponents of horse slaughter take up that question again this week, with the House expected to vote on a bill that would negate an exemption to a three-decade ban on wild horses for slaughter.
One way to get something through Congress is by attaching it to something else on which members need to vote yes.
That is what then-Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) did a few years ago when he attached a rider to another bill that allowed the Bureau of Land Management to sell horses it kept in pens to meat processors if the horse was older than 10 years, or if three attempts to auction the horse off in private sale had failed.
The bill, introduced by House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), rescinds both exceptions, installing once again the outright ban on the sale of wild horses to slaughter.
Separately, the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee this week will hold a hearing on a bill that would completely ban the practice of selling horses, wild or domesticated, for the purposes of processing their meat.
Charlie Stenholm, a former Democratic congressman from Texas, acknowledges the issue engenders a significant amount of emotion, and not to his side’s benefit. Stenholm represents a Texas-based processor that until recently exported horsemeat to markets in Japan and France and other countries where it is considered a delicacy.
Part of Stenholm’s strategy has been a cool-headed budget argument. It costs the Bureau of Land Management roughly $25 million a year to feed and shelter roughly 30,000 wild horses in its management program. Under the pay-go regime, Congress shouldn’t be perpetuating the program when another option is readily available.
The senior director of federal regulatory programs at the American Farm Bureau Federation, Rick Krause, said Rahall’s bill will lead to more horses on the open range competing for grazing land.
“It’s an emotional issue. I’m not sure that the public completely understands the issue in terms of what is really at stake,” Krause said.
Last year, 100,000 horses were slaughtered for consumption, even though Congress previously voted to block funding for the safety inspections required to buy horses for slaughter.
But the Agriculture Department determined private funds could still be used, which perpetuated the practice and prompted a successful court challenge from the Humane Society.
Another court ruling, based on a rarely enforced Texas law that banned horse slaughter, has effectively stopped the processing of horsemeat in the United States.
Proponents like the Humane Society’s Perry still are pushing for a bill, however, both to codify the legal rulings and to prevent the export of American horses to processors in Mexico.
Perry said exports have spiked in the three weeks since the horsemeat processing has stopped.
Bill supporters say owners can still euthanize a horse and sell the carcass to a rendering plant, or bury it. But a ban on horse slaughter for human consumption stops the inhumane practice of transporting horses, often in cramped quarters, to be killed on site, Perry said.
Stenholm said the process is not inhumane.
Animal-rights groups already have one legislative victory under their belts. Congress recently passed a bill to toughen penalties restricting the staging of animal fights such as cockfights or pit-bull fights.
Perry said a number of Republicans have helped the group’s cause in recent years. But there is a more natural fit with Democratic leaders than there was with their Republican counterparts, Perry said. The group is hoping the anti-horse slaughter measures are part of a series of initiatives it will get through Congress this year.
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