The animal rights movement wrongs animals

You’ve heard this anecdote: A boy shoots his parents dead. At his sentencing hearing, he begs the judge for mercy: “I’m an orphan, Your Honor.” In Washington, there’s no shortage of people who talk out of both sides of their mouths, or who have the solutions to problems of their own creation. Lately, the guilty party has been the animal rights lobby, which has been oddly obsessed with — and sadly successful in — undermining animal welfare. About five years ago, the domestic processing of horsemeat for human consumption ended after animal rights activists were able to shut down the industry. Killing horses, even those abandoned and starving, was not to be tolerated. What’s happened since then is nothing for an animal lover to cheer. Horses are now increasingly shipped to Mexico, where they have to endure a longer trip in crammed trailers and tenuous humane-slaughter standards. Meanwhile, horse abandonment and starvation is up, in part due to the economy, and in part because one outlet for these animals was banned. Horse rescues, meanwhile, have no vacancies. One recent study estimates that 100,000 unwanted American horses turn up every year, but the capacity of all the U.S. equine rescues and sanctuaries is only about 13,000 animals. From an animal welfare point of view, it’s a net loss because horses are worse off. A 2011 Government Accountability Office report recommended that Congress reconsider the ban on funding for domestic horse processing. But what do the animal rights activists behind this decrease in animal welfare have to say? The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), a proponent of the domestic ban, now complains that horses are “being exported live to Canada and Mexico … suffering in this trade and meeting an ignominious demise” and cries that “transporting horses long distances … [is] fundamentally inhumane.” In other words, HSUS is whining about a problem it perpetuated — and, of course, the donate button never seems far from these emotional appeals. HSUS’s latest legislative push would ban the export of horses to be used for human food. That would just compound the problem of horse abandonment and starvation that’s already occurring...more