A ban on horse slaughterhouses in New Mexico and Missouri could be next if the budget bill causing the closure of slaughterhouses passes in Congress this week, the Associated Press reported.
Animal rights groups have filed state and federal lawsuits to further postpone the opening of horse slaughterhouses and the bill released on Monday night will reinstate a federal ban on horse slaughterhouses if passed without changes, according to the AP.
The budget bill proposed a cut in funding for necessary inspections of equine killing facilities which may lead to an overall ban on horse slaughterhouses, the AP reported.
"Americans do not want to see scarce tax dollars used to oversee an inhumane, disreputable horse slaughter industry," Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States, told the AP. "We don't have dog and cat slaughter plants in the U.S. catering to small markets overseas, and we shouldn't have horse slaughter operations for that purpose, either."
On the opposite side of the argument, those who think slaughterhouses should remain open believe it is the most humane way of dealing with the growing number of abused and abandoned horses being sent from overseas to Canada and Mexico, the AP reported.
Indian tribes currently support the horse slaughterhouses because they claim "exploding feral horse populations are destroying their rangelands," according to the AP.
Blair Dunn, an attorney for Valley Meat Co. in Roswell, N.M., and Rains Natural Meats in Gallatin, Mo, said "It is certainly disappointing that Congress is returning to a failed policy at the urging of special interest groups while failing to provide for an alternative," the AP reported.
Dunn added that if the budget bill is passed "the result is more waste and devastation of the range and the denial of access to an export market that would have created jobs and positive economic impacts to rural agriculture communities that desperately need these opportunities," according to the AP.
The Obama administration has long lobbied for the funding cut that will affect the slaughterhouses and has even proposed an overall ban on them in the United States, the AP reported. The government has cut funding for the slaughterhouses before in 2006 but reinstated them four years later in 2011.
According to Dunn if Congress votes to cut the funding, it "likely renders the AG's case moot going forward, assuming it was not already moot on jurisdictional grounds," according to the AP.
