If you’re too lazy to Google it (you jerk), here is a decent summary of the horse meat legality changes in the U.S. If you’re even to lazy to click out (god damn you what happened to you in your life to make you such a shit?), the basic deal is that while I think it was always legal to eat horse meat (or prepare it I guess in restaurants or other food-processing places) in the states, until now it wasn’t legal to have horse slaughterhouses on U.S. soil. Interestingly, the slaughterhouse ban was a fairly new law, I think only existing after 2007. I’m not sure what was so different about 20o7 than now in regards to it being okay to kill something for food, but I’m sure it had something to do with politicians needing to say words so they could stay in office.
<3 Mike
Two things really:
1. The economy. Since 2007, thousands of horses have been abandoned throughout the country when their newly unemployed owners could no longer afford to keep them. Furthermore, the commercial horse market has practically collapsed over the last few years. As you can imagine, horses require lot of open area to live on if no one’s taking care of them; open area that doesn’t exist in too many places anymore. They’re also incapable of surviving harsh winters without care. So we now have thousands of starving, ownerless horses throughout the country with no economically feasible means of taking care of them.
2. Horse slaughtering was happening anyways. There are millions of horses in the US and every year, thousands of them are on their last legs, so to speak. Burying a horse isn’t like putting a pet hamster in a shoebox under the rhododendron. It’s really something that the experts have to take care of in most cases. However, since those horses couldn’t be slaughtered here, those experts were largely in Mexico; a place not well known for slaughtering animals in a humane way or following the strictest of sanitary procedures in preparing meat.
So that’s what’s changed in 4 years. The supply of abandoned horses has gone way up and we realized that the unintended consequences of the law were worse for people and horses than the harms that it sought to prevent. It was like Prohibition. Sometimes you try something and it just doesn’t work out the way you thought it would.
As an aside, I’ve had horsemeat in France where it’s a pretty common dish. It’s less gamy than venison, but certainly not in the realm of beef or pork. Would not recommend preparing it at home unless you’re a pretty experienced cook.
I read somewhere that there was this indian reservation that had too many wild horses on it now that there were no more slaughterhouses, so basically the horses were getting out of control and they couldn’t do anything about it so this was basically yet ANOTHER WAY we were screwing native americans.
Actually, it’s WAY better for the horses that there can be slaughterhouses in the USA again.
Making it illegal only cause the horses to be transported thousands and thousands of miles in DISGUSTING, over-crowded transport vehicles to Canada or MEXICO to be slaughtered.
The horses were going to be slaughtered either way, but they are at least spared the torture of transport this way and are killed in facilities that can have some kind of regulation.
Do you really think it’s better for the horses to be transported to Mexico and killed there? NOPE!
It’s just like abortion- making it illegal won’t stop abortions, it just makes them way way way more dangerous and terrible.
The horse meat isn’t really used in the US either, it’s used in other countries like China.
Lol why is everyone so serious about horse meat?
Also I loved the epic face in Beauty frame 3
The expression ‘slaughtering animals in a humane way’ makes me laugh every time. Everyone’s forgetting the (not-so-negligible) difference between humans and animals.