As a rule, Americans don’t eat horse meat. We dropped the habit after World War II, but 14 percent of the world’s population still has a taste for it. That’s more than one billion people. Should Americans be allowed to serve that market?
It’s an increasingly thorny question. Until recently, a handful of U.S. slaughterhouses processed horse meat for consumers overseas. But in 2007 Congress cut off the USDA’s funding for inspectors. Since then, says a study published last month in the Journal of Animal Science, a flood of unwanted horses has been unleashed on the American west.
About 100,000 unwanted American horses turn up every year. And the Journal of Animal Science authors note that the capacity of all the U.S. equine recues and sanctuaries combined is just 13,400.
To animal rights activists who never met an animal they couldn’t lecture you over, there’s no excuse for slaughtering a horse. The wealthy Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) led the push to shutter the industry four years ago.
