I just read this Ann Althouse post on the legal decision which closed Cavel International, the last remaining horse slaughterhouse in the country.
Legal god Richard Posner (ok, that was tongue in cheek) says,
Horse meat was until recently an accepted part of the American diet--the Harvard Faculty Club served horse-meat steaks until the 1970s. No longer is horse meat eaten by Americans..., though it is eaten by people in a number of other countries, including countries in Europe; in some countries it is a delicacy. Meat from American horses is especially prized because our ample grazing land enables them to eat natural grasses, which enhances the flavor of their meat...
[Cavel argues:] The horses will be killed anyway when they are too old to be useful and what difference does it make whether they are eaten by people or by cats and dogs? But the horse meat used in pet food is produced by rendering plants from carcasses rather than by the slaughter of horses, and the difference bears on the effect of the Illinois statute. Cavel pays for horses; rendering plants do not. If your horse dies, or if you have it euthanized, you must pay to have it hauled to the rendering plant, and you must also pay to have it euthanized if it didn't just die on you. So when your horse is no longer useful to you, you have a choice between selling it for slaughter and either keeping it until it dies or having it killed. The option of selling the animal for slaughter is thus financially more advantageous to the owner, and this makes it likely that many horses (remember that Cavel slaughters between 40,000 and 60,000 a year) die sooner than they otherwise would because they can be killed for their meat. States have a legitimate interest in prolonging the lives of animals that their population happens to like....
Of course Illinois could do much more for horses than it does--could establish old-age pastures for them, so that they would never be killed (except by a stray cougar), or provide them with free veterinary care. But it is permitted to balance its interest in horses' welfare against the other interests of its (human) population; and it is also permitted to take one step at a time on a road toward the humane treatment of our fellow animals....
But even if no horses live longer as a result of the new law, a state is permitted, within reason, to express disgust at what people do with the dead, whether dead human beings or dead animals. There would be an uproar if restaurants in Chicago started serving cat and dog steaks, even though millions of stray cats and dogs are euthanized in animal shelters. A follower of John Stuart Mill would disapprove of a law that restricted the activities of other people (in this case not only Cavel's owners and employees but also its foreign consumers) on the basis merely of distaste, but American governments are not constrained by Mill's doctrine.
I had no idea people were eating horse in this country in the 1970s. This story made me think of two things. First, if Americans were eating horse as recently as the 70s, what changed our minds? It's not like eating dogs or cats; to my knowledge, Americans have never condoned eating these animals (although if you got sufficiently hungry in the hills of West Virginia during the Depression, you might have cooked Fluffy). What sea change took place to make Americans turn up their nose at horse?
The second question I have is more legally philosophical. I find Posner's decision to be dangerously close to equating human beings with animals (I know our friends on the left already think this). While government does regulate how to dispose of the remains of both humans and animals, it seems to me that most people understand that humans are a bit different than burying your pet goldfish. Decisions like this one, which equate horses and humans, is just the most recent step down the slippery slope to treating animals exactly as humans.
On a less serious note, I loved the ending to this straight news story covering the event.
Before the DeKalb facility, the last two U.S. plants for horse slaughtering in operation were closed in January after a Texas law banning the practice was upheld.
"The lone cowboy riding his horse on a Texas trail is a cinematic icon," wrote Judge Fortunato Benavides of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. "Not once in memory did the cowboy eat his horse."
That's a keeper. :)
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