On Jan. 5, 2015, Meatingplace.com had an article about FSIS raising rates for inspection done outside the normal hours of business.

Colleen Michaels managed to work the ban on horse slaughter into the reader comment conversation that followed.

Not only did she and others misrepresent some of the facts surrounding the issue of horse slaughter in the United State, she said, “FSIS should have the balls to tell the government that inspection could not be ‘divided-up’ to be defunded in being paid by specie….”

Many responders jumped on the old bandwagon rhetoric that this ban on horse slaughter was all the doing of PETA and other animal rights organizations. While those organizations were vocal, the people I saw the most in the halls of Congress urging for a ban were Bo Derek and T Boone Pickens.

Here are the facts and timelines as I remember them:

June 6, 2005: Representative John Sweeney, R-NY, proposed an amendment to the 2005-2006 Ag Appropriations Bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds for horse slaughter inspection. It passed 269-158.

Sept. 20, 2005: Senator John Ensign, R-NV, offered a Senate version that passed 69-28

Nov. 10, 2005: The Ag Appropriations Act was signed into law.

H.R. 2744-45, Sec. 794 read: “Effective 120 days after enactment of this Act, none of the funds available in the Act may be used to pay the salaries or expenses of personnel to inspect horses under Section 3 of the Federal Meat Inspection Act…”

Well, if you can’t inspect them, you can’t get them dead.

Feb. 8, 2006: USDA/FSIS issued a new regulation (CFR 352.19) that allowed existing horse slaughter facilities to circumvent the ban on horse slaughter by paying FSIS for the inspection.

When I was asked by elected officials how we could blatantly ignore the obvious intent of both the House and Senate, I replied that the language, as written, was simply to ban the funding for inspection, not ban the slaughter of horses.

Sept. 8, 2006: The House passed the American Horse Slaughter Act but it died in the Senate.

March 8, 2007: The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that it was illegal for slaughterhouses to pay the USDA for their own inspection and FSIS pulled its inspectors from horse slaughter facilities on March 9, 2007. (But they continued to receive payment from the Bison industry to inspect those critters that were headed for interstate sales.)

Nov. 18, 2011: The Ag Appropriations Bill for 2012 was signed into law with no reference to the ban on funding, essentially making it possible once again for horses to get dead for human consumption.

Jan. 14, 2014: The ban was once again reinstated as part of the Omnibus Appropriations Act

In the meantime, both Illinois and Texas, the only two states where there were horse slaughter facilities, passed laws prohibiting the killing of horses for human consumption or possessing horse meat for sale or trade in those states and both laws survived judicial scrutiny when appeals were filed by the slaughter facilities.

So, Colleen, I think FSIS did the right thing in trying to find an alternative and showed intestinal fortitude in doing so.

But when I was installed as the Undersecretary for FSIS I also took an oath to follow the laws of the United States.

To do less than that would be a demonstration of not having a lick of “good horse sense.”

Horse slaughter: Just the facts, ma’am

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