I hope you haven’t just eaten, because we need
to talk about horsemeat. It’s not widely known, but there are three
horse-slaughter factories in the United States — two in Texas, one in
Illinois. Each year, some 90,000 horses are trucked to these facilities,
where they are killed (some die an agonizing death), chopped and ground
into meat, then shipped off to be someone’s dinner. Americans, however, don’t eat horsemeat —
it’s no longer even used for pet food here. This meat goes to Europe.
Two of the slaughterhouses in our country are owned by Belgians, the other
by French investors. OK, they fancy horsemeat — but we don’t
have to provide it. In China, people eat cats. Shall we let Chinese
investors build a kittycat slaughterhouse here? The good news is that an overwhelming, bipartisan
majority in Congress passed an amendment in December to put a temporary
halt to the slaughter of horses for human consumption. The bad news is that
Bush is in office. Astonishingly, the Bush administration is siding with
the three foreign horsemeat corporations, defying the direct order of
Congress to stop the killing! What Congress did was to amend the Agriculture
Department’s appropriations bill to say that none of its money could
be spent to inspect horsemeat plants in the next year. No inspection, no
meat — no meat, no slaughterhouse. But that underestimates the
corporate servility and autocratic arrogance of the Bushites. Bush
agriculture officials have ruled that although the amendment prevents
spending the department’s money for horsemeat inspection, the three
companies can pay the inspectors themselves under a special fee-for-service
arrangement, thus continuing the slaughter and the shipping. Agriculture officials are letting the foreign firms
do this without allowing the public to comment.
This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 1, 2006.
