Newsweek gives one-sided view of wild horses and slaughter

Tuesday's Horse


Sue Wallis Guest Spots in Weekly News Magazine
Written by JADED MARE
An online Newsweek article entitled “Wyoming Ponders Slaughtering Horses” written by McKay Coppins gives a one-sided view of wild horses and slaughter that should have been ascribed, not to Coppins, but to Sue Wallis (unless, of course, McKay Coppins is Wallis’s nom de plume), or at the very least, appeared as an Op-Ed piece instead of a factual, news report.
This is yet another example of how American media outlets do absolutely no research, but simply copies and pastes propaganda spewed from anyone and everyone without any verification whatsoever of the facts. Shame on Coppins. Shame on Newsweek. Shame on the American media.
The opening paragraph reads:

The wild horse is a symbol of the frontier way of life. But in recent years it’s been recast in a less noble role—as a public nuisance. The Bureau of Land Management has tried culling herds through roundups, auctions, and federal corrals.

No so bad so far, but read the remainder of it:

But the feral ranks have nearly tripled, to 69,000 since 1971, and more than half of those horses are roaming free in 10 Western states. Factor in the thousands of horses turned loose during the recession, and the result, the government contends, is a population that’s overwhelmed its habitat.

With America’s wild horses and burros on the brink of extinction because of needless, cruel and herd-destroying roundups, the last thing they need is this kind of journalistic slop.
Sue Wallis, naturally, has the answer for all of these alleged “nuisance” wild and domestic horses, namely slaughter.

Wyoming thinks it has a solution. In 2007 Congress blocked the inspection of horse meat, which effectively ended interstate sales and closed the last U.S. abattoir. But selling horse meat intrastate remains legal, and state Rep. Sue Wallis wants to use that fact to license Wyoming’s first slaughterhouse to help owners who can’t afford to care for their animals.

Getting back to our wild horses, Wallis says:

” . . . for a horse on overgrazed land, slaughter beats starvation.”

The BLM must love her.
It seems clear that they do not teach the difference between what constitutes a news article and what constitutes an editorial in U.S. Journalism classes. Editors and publishers appear to have forgotten, if they ever knew. Then there is the obvious absence of fact checking. This type of reporting, in our opinion, is more appropriate to Communism 101 than Journalism 101.
There are no comments to “Wyoming Ponders Horse Slaughter” as of this posting. If you wish to give the horses’ side of the story, please go to http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/30/wyoming-ponders-slaughtering-horses.html