If Montana HB 418 passes, the horse slaughter house bill, you can ship her off to Montana and have her turned into dog food, pectin, Oscar-Meyer wieners and other mainstream by-products. The bill, believe it or not has been heard in the house and is now off to the Senate.
From Rep. Ed Butcher (ironically enough), R-Winifred , the bills sponsor- In increasingly tough economic times, Butcher noted that animal cruelty and horse abandonment cases are rising as ranchers and horse owners find they can no longer afford to care for their animals. A U.S. slaughterhouse, Butcher says, would be “a humane way to address the problem.â€
Yeah sure, sort of like flushing the kids goldfish and pet alligators down the toilet because they don’t want them anymore, or running fido down to the pound because he has a badass attitude that you don’t want to deal with anymore. It’s a good thing someone came up with divorce or one of these knuckleheads would be advocating a Spouse Euthanasia bill. If horse owners don’t have any more commitment than that they shouldn’t have the horse in the first place.
Even the concept of slaughtering the “ol swayback”, that old horse that has been working around the ranch all it’s life or packing someones elk out of the wilderness for years doesn’t cut it. That’s like shipping your dad off, after he’s worked his ass off all his life to put food on the table and maybe send you to college to the packing house.
Unless I’m mistaken, this is not a euthanasia bill, killing animals whose quality of life is so bad that killing them is saving them from suffering; their bodies, part and parsel are used up, worn out. The Kevorkian for horses bill it’s not. It’s about killing healthy animals (one hopes) and rendering them into by-products. Just another form of livestock, like a pig, a cow? Sorry, but when I look at horse, interact with a horse, I’m interacting with another pretty intelligent being not an animal that’s had all it’s brain bred out and is nothing but a walking source of protein.
I’m not a dyed in the wool animal rights activist but slaughtering a horse because he’s old and can’t work anymore or he’s to big to flush down the toilet is (sorry, equines) bullshit. Personally I think this bill runs deeper than just slaughtering peoples cast off horses.
Could it be that the BLM managers are secretly looking on with the anticipation that this might be a way to unload their wild horse problem? All those horses that are cluttering up the western landscape, competing with stock interests, grazing the grasslands down to nubbins?
I wonder.
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YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT!! Why don’t you just stick to fishing and let the folks that understand the equine industry do their job! Your ignorance is overwhelming. If you truley were an equine professional (or even enthusiast) you would be able to consider the broader picture this issue presents. But let’s just think about the torture a fish endures-even with your pansy catch & release bit-45% of fish die anyway after release-a slow agonizing death. What a waste.
Stay out of what you don’t understand.
I make no claim to be an “equine professional” but it sounds like maybe you have some connection with the “equine industry” so maybe you can enlighten those of us whose “ignorance is overwhelming” what “broader picture this issue presents”?
As for my “pansy catch and release bit”, I don’t know where you got your 45% mortality number from but even if it was anywhere near that it’s still better than 100%. I doubt if the “torture a fish endures” on the end of my line is any harsher than any number of other things that it encounters in its environment in its lifetime. For instance, being swallowed whole and slowly suffocated and digested by a larger fish, or maybe just bit in half, or maybe just escaping with a few nice gashes only to die later. My guess is that, considering those kinds of alternatives, a little hook puncture in the jaw and a short aerobic workout would hardly seem like “torture”.
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