Horse Meat Coming To A County Near You?

Someone has crafted an argument that there are too many horses in the United States, that feed and care for horses costs too much and that the solution to the problem is to open horse slaughterhouses here in Oregon on the reservations and to have the Department of Agriculture resume inspecting horse meat for human consumption. The intermediate step in this process is to open the slaughterhouses for the production of pet food.

The U.S. currently ships lots of horses over the border for slaughter. In recent years a number of star racing horses, once coddled and prized for making their owners money, have made that terrible journey. These horses get shipped over the borders because the American pet food industry got caught running particularly inhumane slaughterhouses at a time when horses were moving from being considered beasts of burden and work animals to companions for humans. The industry shut down most of its American production, and I believe that the USDA stopped inspecting horse meat for human consumption. Changing those policies now will require a shift in our culture and changes in federal and state policies.

I want to suggest that other agendas are at work here than concern for horses and their feed and maintenance costs. Raising and breeding horses for food, selling horse meat for human consumption, broadening or increasing the numbers and kinds of animals to be used for our consumption and manipulating the American diet certainly means higher profits and higher rates of profit for the multinational food conglomerates. I can easily foresee a time when the rural people who are struggling now to pay feed, land and vet costs are employed on what was once their land as food industry and food processing workers. Turning impoverished Native Americans into almost-impoverished slaughterhouse workers to begin with will not create real economic development on the reservations, will not build tribal sovereignty and will not give the tribes back a part of their cultures taken from them by the settler-colonialists.

There is already too much meat in the American diet. Further corporate exploitation of the environment and the food chains helps no one but the multinational corporations. Horses have become companion animals for humans: capitalism is once again ready to sacrifice the desire for companionship and warmth for profits. The numbers and kinds of animals we relate positively to should be increasing, not decreasing, at this point in human history. The slaughterhouses will be located in the poorest areas of the U.S. and will certainly pollute and ruin these areas. The dead-end jobs created by the food industry--which exists solely for profit, and not at all for feeding people--are back-breaking and alienating.

Before someone in labor or on the left or in the tribes accuses me of elitism and/or ultra-leftism or makes the too-familiar jobs argument or reminds us that horse meat is consumed all over the world I want to say the following: the opportunities to make choices, push alternate social models forward and win concessions from the system are always present and these are among the most important tasks of the left. How the environment was treated two days ago and how animals were treated yesterday is how the poorest people will be treated today and how the working class and the middle classes will be treated tomorrow and the day after.