Pass the Horse Slaughter Protection Act

While the slaughterhouses in the United States have recently been closed, horses are still being slaughtered– they are merely being shipped across the border to Canada and Mexico, where they meet horrific ends.

In Mexico, for example, horses are repeatedly stabbed by “puntilla” knives until they bleed to death. These are not horses who are bred for meat, but horses who could have been a little girl’s best friend until purchased by a killer buyer at an auction.

In 2012, Obama signed an Appropriations Bill that would once again pave the way for slaughterhouses to operate in the United States again. Not withstanding the enormous environmental, legal and other concerns that a slaughterhouse brings to a town, the suffering of the horses who are sent to these plants is astronomical. They are sometimes put into trailers and left for days without water, then half-crazed, they are violently prodded into the slaughterhouse, where they are supposed to be killed by a captive bolt. Unfortunately, the horses are so scared that these bolts sometimes go into the horses’ eyes and the horse is struck again and again until stunned. It is not uncommon for a horse not to be killed by the captive bolt, but only stunned, so that they are actually alive while being vivisected.

Considering how horses are treated to the kill pens and how they are killed, here is no possible way that slaughter can ever be considered humane euthanasia.