meat is murder

A significant step in the nail of the coffin of the meat industry? Now Animal Rights Advocates need to not let a new meat markets slip in and fill the gap and instead keep hammering home the message about the damage that meat consumption does to peoples’ health and the environment.  [src]

CHICAGO — The line of horses stepping toward their slaughter at a DeKalb, Ill., plant came to an abrupt halt Thursday after a federal court order that horse lovers and animal rights advocates hope may mark the end of the controversial practice of killing American horses to ship their meat overseas.

There are just three such slaughterhouses left in the United States, and the two others, both in Texas, stopped the slaughter in the past couple of months after a separate case in which a New Orleans federal court upheld a 1949 Texas law that banned the sale of horse meat.

Popular opinion has swayed against the practice in recent years and legislative bans are garnering bipartisan support in both Washington and Springfield. The federal ruling Wednesday halted the slaughter indefinitely, but animal advocates hope lawmakers will take action soon to ensure that the last horse butchered for human meat in the United States was in Cavel International’s “killing box” in DeKalb on Wednesday.

“If I were any of these plants and I was looking around me, I would see no escape at this point,” said Nancy Perry, the vice president of government affairs for The Humane Society of the United States.

The latest order came from a U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia judge who ruled Wednesday that it was illegal for horse slaughterhouses to pay the U.S. Department of Agriculture to cover costs of their own health inspections. The USDA had agreed to do that with the nation’s three remaining horse slaughterhouses in early 2006 after Congress cut off funding for those inspections in 2005, but the Humane Society sued, calling that arrangement a conflict of interest.

As a result of the ruling, the USDA Thursday pulled its on-site inspectors-including a veterinarian who checks that the animals are healthy enough so that their meat will be fit for human consumption-from the DeKalb slaughterhouse. Thus, the slaughter ceased.

“Obviously you don’t want regulated agencies paying for their government inspections,” Perry said. “If they saw something concerning and they wanted to shut down the slaughter, the hand that’s feeding them is the same one that they would be biting.”

But James Tucker, the general manager of the Belgian-owned Cavel plant, called the ruling “bizarre and outrageous.” He said the funding arrangement did not alter the inspectors’ ability to be critical.

“The Congress wanted to not have ante-mortem inspections of horses funded and we made arrangements with the USDA so it would not be funded by government funds,” Tucker said. “Now to have the court ruling that that was not correctly done is, well, is a shame.”

Tucker called the ruling an “awful blow” to the 55 people employed at the DeKalb plant, which slaughters about 1,000 horses a week and generates $30 million a year in foreign trade by shipping meat mostly to Europe, where it is still considered a delicacy.

The USDA did not seek an immediate injunction, according to Steven Cohen, a spokesman for the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.

“The lawyers are reviewing the ruling, but the ruling was very clear and the judge’s order was very clear and the department is complying,” Cohen said.