Pass the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act to ban the barbaric butchering of American horses

Despite that over 80% of Americans are strongly opposed to horse slaughter, the trade in horse meat continues to operate in the shadows.

Many states – including Texas, California and Illinois – have banned domestic slaughterhouses, yet their laws do not extend past their borders or prevent American horses from being slaughtered for human consumption abroad.

Each year tens of thousands of American horses are sold at livestock auctions where they fall prey to “killer buyers” – middlemen who buy from unsuspecting owners. These buyers collect the horses - 90% of which the US Department of Agriculture's Guidelines for Handling and Transporting Equines to Slaughter deems in “good” condition - in poorly managed feedlots. The horses are then loaded onto a truck and mixed without regard to gender or size before being hauled for more than 24 hours across U.S borders to slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada. Deprived of rest, food or water, many often suffer injury and even death on the road.

Arriving at these foreign plants, the horses are led into stalls where they are brutally killed. Ultimately, the plants transport the horse-meat for consumption at high-end eateries in countries like Italy, France, Belgium and Japan.

In an effort to curtail this inhumane industry, the new American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act is up for a vote that would ban export of horses en masse for slaughter in foreign plants in Canada and Mexico and prevent the possibility of slaughterhouses from operating domestically.

Sign the petition telling Congress to pass this extremely important legislation and end this barbaric practice forever.