BigBallinStalin wrote:In the US, you can legally cut up horses and sell their meat elsewhere.
U.S. officials: No horse meat in our beefHorse meat cannot be sold for human consumption in the United States, Cochran added. "There are currently no establishments in the United States that slaughter horses, and FSIS does not allow imports of horse meat from other countries for human consumption."
I had made the mistake that I had assumed they managed to pass the export law recently; I see that they have not.
Horse meat hasn't always been illegal in the United State. Up until 2005 FSIS regularly inspected horse slaughter plants along with all other types of meat production facilities. Animal rights activists made a major push to stop the sale of horse meat and Congress added an amendment to the Agricultural Appropriations Act taking away funding for the inspection of horses being transported to slaughter.
FSIS then made horse inspection a fee-for-service inspection, just as bison still is. Congress went back and rewrote the law saying no money could be spent at "any inspection of horse slaughter," said Raymond, who at USDA at the time. By 2007 the last three American facilities that slaughtered horses for human consumption were shut down, according to a petition filed with USDA by the Humane Society in 2012.
Today American horses are still slaughtered for food, it just takes place in Mexico and Canada rather than on U.S. soil. The Government Accountability Office found that in 2010 more than 137,000 U.S. horses were sent to Mexico and Canada each year to be slaughtered. That's about as many were slaughtered in the United States before the ban went into effect in 2007, GAO said.
So in that, I stand corrected. My local vineyard also stables rescue horses.
