Did Obama really legalize horse slaughter or that just propaganda?

[Starlight 1]

Yes, Moonfire, it is true, and no, the president's critics didn't make it up. The president signed an Agricultural appropriations bill into law on November 18, 2011. That legislation contains language which reauthorizes and refinances the federal inspection program for slaughterhouses that process horse meat. This marks the first time in 6 years that the authorization request was granted- the program was originally defunded by a vote of Congress back in 2005, and annual refunding requests have been voted down every year since then until now. I can't post links because this computer I'm on won't allow me to, but I recommend that you go to either the WH website or the website of the Congressional Record and look it up. For the record, I OBJECT very strongly to the new law, although I don't necessarily oppose slaughter. The main reason WHY I object is because the inspection program which this law authorizes is going to be paid for by American TAXPAYERS instead by the owners of the companies that want to open and operate plants here. Most of those companies are foreign based (Cavel, which owned and operated the slaughterhouse outside of Chicago, has its headquarters in Brussels, Belgium) and exist mainly to serve the Asian and European markets. When the slaughter plants were still open in 2007, the inspection program was costing American taxpayers about 5 MILLION dollars a year, while the companies that operated the plants were making profits of nearly 5 times that much. All their revenues were being sent back to Europe instead of becoming part of the US economy and helping to fund American jobs. Now that this new legislation has been signed into law, the same thing is going to happen all over again, only on a much larger scale. There are plans in the works to build slaughterhouses for horse meat in at least half a dozen US states, and more are planned for the future, because the Asian and European markets are so lucrative and the demand for American horsemeat is so huge right now. Whatever few jobs will be created by the new inspection program ( and there will be at least some, because the companies that own the plants can't sell or export their products without inspections that show the meat is safe for consumption) will be more than offset by the huge increases in taxes that we will ALL be paying in the future, once the plants are up and operating. But to me, the saddest part about this is that it WON'T SOLVE the equine over population problem in the US. In fact, it won't even scratch the surface. The only real way to solve that problem ( and by the way, the president and Congress are correct when they say there is one) is to put a stop to the rampant OVERBREEDING of horses that has been going on for decades now. Unless and until that is done (and there are numerous ways to do it that don't involve slaughter) then the situation isn't going to change or get any better, period.

Thanks for your support, Sandra- and welcome to the regular horse section. It's nice to have a fresh voice in here. ( For those of you who aren't familiar with her, Sandra is a regular from the Horse racing section who has been around for years.)