A news release dated October 8, issued by the Ohio Farm Bureau through its Policy Outreach Program, reveals a 370 percent increase over the past year in the number of American horses shipped to ‘slaughterhouse’ in Juarez, Mexico. In October 2006 about 8,100 horses were processed in Juarez. From January-September 2007 the lives of 30,000 horses were brutally terminated in a Juarez processing plant as a result of efforts in the United States legislature to close the horse-processing market by making it illegal. The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill outlawing the legal operation of processing plants as a secondary market for unwanted/unsound horses; the House of Representatives passed HR 503, but a corresponding Senate bill, S. 311, failed to come to a vote. The last three processing plants in Texas and Illinois were shut down this summer, and funding for humane USDA food inspectors and veterinarians ceased this summer, preventing owners of unsound and/or unwanted horses from finding a useful outlet in the United States for their personal property. Both Houses in the 110th Congress, which convened in September, have reintroduced these bills, which makes shipping, transporting, or any other involvement in the processing of horses as meat strictly illegal and punishable by law.
 
As a result, the ‘slaughterhouses’ in Juarez are receiving an increased number of horses for processing. Unfortunately, the procedures at the Juarez plant are obviously outside the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Agriculture and United States Veterinary Association standards of humane processing. Horses that are terminated in Juarez instead of U.S. processing plants are stabbed in the back with a small knife multiple times. As the blood streams down their bodies, they must deal with paralysis for at least several minutes before they are hoisted in the air by their legs to await their final death knell. Death comes only after the horses’ throats are slit and they are left to bleed to death. Ironically, the Juarez plant owns the captive bolt guns, which are the vehicle used in U.S. plants to bring instant and humane death to the animal. The problem is that the bolt guns frequently are inoperable because of mechanical failures. Nevertheless, even when the equipment works, those individuals assigned to use it are thought to have little or no training in the methodology of humane death.  
 
It is incredibly ironic that those interests who have opposed horse processing in the United States on the grounds of its being inhumane now have the revelation that the U.S. horses that are processed must truly suffer in a nation where humane regulations do not apply. In fact, whenever horses now die under these conditions, we all need to know that the U.S. has legislated its way out of the necessity of providing humane processing.  
 
Remember your U.S. legislators and all of the Political Action Committees, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, who made this outcome not just possible, but absolutely inevitable.