For The Love of Horses: No Horse Slaughter Plant Yet For Missouri As Antagonists Continue Opposition

Straight from the Horses's Heart

Posted: October 9, 2012 by R.T. Fitch

by Frank Buchman of the Kansas Rural Messenger

“Americans don’t eat horse meat…”

“The ‘bleeding hearts’ got reprieve again.”

Eye to the Soul by Terry Fitch of Wild Horse Freedom Federation

It sounds terribly rude, and crude, but that’s exactly the way one lifelong horse breeder, champion-horse exhibitor, internationally-recognized horse merchandizer, and true horse lover evaluated announcement that ahorse slaughter facility to be open in Missouri at this time is not operating due to intrusion from politically-instigated opposition.

The plant at Rockville, Mo., population 166, was set to be in business by summer’s end, employing four dozen people.

Residents there had embraced turning a defunct beef processing plant into the nation’s first horse slaughtering facility since 2006.

“The whole town is for it,” proclaimed Mayor David Moore in June.

Now it looks like horse meat won’t be the town’s salvation, at least not anytime soon.

It could take months for a judge to resolve all the questions surrounding the plant’s ownership.

And, that seems to be the least of the problems facing the horse slaughtering industry in Missouri, and nationwide.

Slaughtering of horses for human consumption could be legislatively abolished, before it has the chance to revive itself.

Congress in effect banned the practice in 2006 by cutting funding for United States Department of Agricultureinspections of horse meat. Then late last year, funding was restored, making horse slaughtering legal again.

Rep. Sue Wallis, R-Wyo., the nation’s most visible horse slaughtering proponent, announced plans for the Rockville plant in June.

It was her second attempt in less than a year to bring a
slaughtering house to Missouri. But, Wallis hadn’t yet purchased the plant.

When Cynthia MacPherson, a Mountain Grove, Mo., lawyer , heard about Wallis’ plans, she looked into the plant and found a series of shell corporations and unusual transfers of the property.

MacPherson tracked down one of the plant’s creditors and sued on his behalf, asking a judge to block any sale of the plant until her client was repaid.

Plans by Wallis earlier this year to open a slaughtering house near Mountain Grove were thwarted by MacPherson, who rallied opposition through webpages and fervent pleas to the City Council.

Wallis eventually abandoned the Mountain Grove proposal, and then a few weeks later revealed plans for the plant at Rockville, about 90 miles south of Kansas City, because of its location.

“If you draw a 500-mile circle around southwest Missouri, you enclose more than 30 percent of the horses in the United States,” she said.

Now, Wallis and her business partner, lawyer Dan Erdel of Mexico, Mo., have announced strategies for a facility in eastern Oklahoma, even though state law there prohibits horses from being slaughtered for human consumption.

However, in June, Rep. Jim Moran, R-Va., moved to strip USDA of money to perform the inspections. “Americans don’t eat horse meat, and taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize foreign palates,” Moran rationalized.

“When more than 80 percent of the American population opposes this practice, it’s high time we put an end, once and for all, to industrial horse slaughter,” Moran said of the provision that is part of an agricultural appropriations bill pending before Congress…continued

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