http://www.thepetitionsite.com/4...

Please sign this petition to help make animal cruelty a felony in the US!

What gives humans the right to take over this land and push animals off of it? They were here first. If you have a pet, love it. If you don't have one, get one. They are wonderful. Man (and woman) need to move over and give this land back to the animals. We are destroying it.

animals have rights. like humans that have the right to enjoy life, so do animals. animals have the right to be happy. animals have the right to be loved. animals have the right to be respected. STOP THE ABUSE NOW!!!!!

id rather die than watch someone abuse an animal. i think whoever abuses an animal should be tought a lesson. if i could id show em how much it hurts and how much they suffer my self. PUT AN END TO ANIMAL ABUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!! meghan i looked for u to add u but i couldnt find u. my name is hannah carter if u want to add me. u seem like a nice friend

your welcome and horse raceing is 1 of the worst!!!

Since I was a child I have never enjoyed the Rodeo or the Circus and have never exposed my own children to either of them. I Prefer the Cirque du Soleil , sorry if I have misspelled that....they, as adults, have no interest in viewing this sorry excuse for "entertainment." thank you for posting this...

IF THE SLAUGHTER HOUSES HAD GLASS DOORS THE WHOLE WORLD WOULD BE A VEGATERIAN!

For those who are interested, please visit my new blog
called PETA Vs Pit Bulls!

Thanks,

I had no idea that the rodeo was so inhumane! Thank you for bringing it to my attention I will never watch another rodeo and will spread the word! How horrid.

Montana Governor Allows HB 418 to Become Law!

A measure promoting privately-owned horse processing plant development in Montana became law on Friday when Gov. Brian Schweitzer allowed the bill to lapse into law.



Gov. Brian Schweitzer

The measure sponsored by Rep. Ed Butcher, R-Winifred, aims to limit the kind of legal challenges that forced the last U.S. slaughterhouses, which were in Illinois and Texas, to close in 2007.


View Image
Rep. Ed Butcher

Montana horse slaughter bill becomes law without governor's signature
On Friday May 1, 2009, 8:10 pm EDT

Buzz up! Print.HELENA, Mont. (AP) --

Legislation to allow investor-owned horse slaughterhouses in Montana and limit opportunities for legal action against them became law on Friday, after Gov. Brian Schweitzer neither signed nor vetoed the measure.

Friday was the deadline for Schweitzer to act and, with no action by him, House Bill 418 automatically became law.


The bill includes some protection against court injunctions that would stop or delay slaughterhouse construction. The measure sponsored by Rep. Ed Butcher, R-Winifred, aims to limit the kind of legal challenges that forced the last U.S. slaughterhouses, which were in Illinois and Texas, to close in 2007.

During the 2009 legislative session, which ended Tuesday, Schweitzer rejected the limit on legal action. He said it would strip people of appeal rights important in environmental protection. The Legislature then rejected the changes Schweitzer wanted.

Butcher said during the session that the governor's amendments would make the bill "an empty shell because nobody's going to invest five to six million in a
business in Montana if they're going to be harassed."


Schweitzer has said that as an owner of livestock and horses, he supports the humane processing of horses to produce meat for human consumption.

His communications director, Sarah Elliott, issued a terse statement Friday, saying only that "the governor made his opinion on this bill known, the Legislature did the same. No action was taken and the bill has now become law."

The bill brought lawmakers and the governor a flood of e-mails and telephone messages, from across the country, in support of the legislation and against it.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Mo...



Too many horses: Northwest tribes consider slaughter facility for wild horses
5/8/2009, 10:06 a.m. PT
The Associated Press


(AP) — Sunday 5-10 release () ?

(PHOTOS) (HAS TRIM)

By Lynda V. Mapes

The Seattle Times

(MCT)

WARM SPRINGS INDIAN RESERVATION-Here on this reservation in north-central Oregon, horses are woven deeply into daily life. They are traditionally used by tribal members in their work and their culture, whether it be for rodeos or horse parades.

Gathering, breaking and selling wild horses has long been part of the tribe's economy. Horses that don't make the grade are sold for slaughter.

But the nation's final three slaughterhouses were shuttered two years ago, and a perfect storm has formed with a glut of horses, lack of a market and economic recession.

Tribal rangeland managers now estimate 20,000 wild horses are overrunning Indian Country in Washington, Idaho and Oregon, with an annual foal crop raising the population by some 20 percent a year. At the Yakama reservation, range managers say 12,000 wild horses are damaging medicinal plants, depleting forage for wildlife, eroding fragile rangelands and harming salmon streams. Domestic animals, including cattle, add to the problem.

"We have been spending billions on salmon and steelhead recovery, and it goes for naught if we don't do something that fixes these other problems," said Arlen Washines, program manager for the Yakama Nation Wildlife Program.

Agricultural and rangeland experts from five tribes have been meeting quietly since last winter to explore options to manage horse populations on reservation lands. Their ideas, still in discussion, run the gamut. The most controversial: opening a slaughter plant at the Warm Springs reservation, and maybe someday packing the meat for human consumption overseas, if the regulatory hurdles can be cleared and economics pencil out.

The Northwest Tribal Horse Coalition, as the working group calls itself, says it wants to save and care for the horses with better management of the herds. The group is exploring adoption and contraception, but issued a draft report that declares some wild horses will have to be killed to rebalance the ecosystem. The coalition believes horse-slaughtering facilities are needed now-starting with a plant at Warm Springs.

There used to be a thriving horse market in this country, with buyers bidding on horses for processing plants in Stanwood, Wash.; Maytown, Wash.; and more than 20 other plants across the country, supplying an eager trade, particularly in Europe.

But the country's remaining three horse slaughterhouses, in Illinois and Texas, closed in 2007 after a sustained campaign by animal-rights activists that resulted in Congress forbidding USDA inspection of horse meat for human consumption. That ended any legal commercial packing industry for horse meat in this country.

Still, there is a demand for horse meat, particularly in Europe. But with no packer competition in the U.S. to supply it, and a glut of horses, foreign packers can set their price.

Trucking the animals long distances to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico also means buyers will take only the fattest, biggest animals.

For the sick, the old and the skinny, today there is often no market at any price. Buyers who remember paying 70 cents a pound at auction are today paying as little as 6 cents a pound-if the packers will even take the animal.

And the problem stretches far beyond Indian Country.

The bottom has fallen out of the horse market just as the recession is driving even owners of pedigreed, suburban stock to unload animals they can't afford to care for, overwhelming rescue and shelter operators.

It's the same story for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which is struggling to feed and care for some 30,000 wild mustangs gathered from public rangelands and put out to pasture in the Midwest in deference to opponents of slaughter.

The BLM is paying $27 million this year alone to feed and care for wild horses living out their days at taxpayer expense. With another 30,000 or so wild mustangs still roaming the range, multiplying every year, the costs are growing. So far, the BLM has no solution to the problem.

Jenny Edwards, executive director of Hope for Horses, a nonprofit horse-rescue organization based in Woodinville, Wash., said that while she is no fan of slaughter, it is a necessary option. "We have to be big boys and girls about this-be realistic," Edwards said.

"It was part of the economic circle of life. It was the legitimate outlet for horses that were unusable for other purposes."

The Northwest Tribal Horse Coalition, composed of members of the Yakama and Colville tribes in Washington, the Umatilla and Warm Springs tribes in Oregon, and Shoshone Bannock in Idaho, wants a rendering plant at Warm Springs where live horses from the reservations and beyond could be slaughtered. The meat and carcasses would be processed for nonhuman consumption and disposal.

Markets for the meat, such as zoos, are being explored. Jason Smith, range and agriculture manager at Warm Springs, has traveled to Canada to examine packing plants.

Several states, including Montana, also are looking into the possibility of reviving U.S. horse slaughter.

They all face an uphill battle with animal-rights activists seeking to restrict slaughter even further. Legislation is pending in Congress to outlaw transporting U.S. horses to slaughter-anywhere.

"It's not an option," said Katie Merwick, president and founder of Second Chance Ranch, a horse-rescue operation in Elma, Wash. "It's not conscionable, it's not moral. It's a horrible, scary transport and a violent death."

She said euthanasia is the only acceptable alternative. While it's expensive-it can cost $750 to put down and haul away a horse-it's cheaper than keeping the animal, and can be paid for in installments, Merwick said. "I guarantee if it was to fix your car, you'd find the money," Merwick said.

But people are simply dumping their animals because they see no other choice, Edwards said.

"Horses are being just abandoned," she said. "All over the place, all over the country."

(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)

The lack of a viable horse-slaughter market has disrupted tribes' traditional relationships with their horses. "They fooled with our culture and our livelihood and our right to work," said Smith, at Warm Springs.

Here on the reservation, horses peer from rimrock cliffs, doze in the sagebrush, and streak in free-running herds across the flats at the base of Mount Jefferson, looking every bit the icon of the West some people think they are.

The highways on the reservation are posted with signs depicting the streaming mane and tail of a running wild horse. On the 1,000-square-mile reservation, fences are few, and horses have the right of way. "You hit it, you buy it," is how it goes around here.

But on this reservation horses aren't icons or romantic abstractions. "We break and sell the best of our horses, and with no horse market, there has to be an out for the old ones, the sick ones, the ones that just don't make the cut," Smith said. "That is a huge part of our management. Without it they are neglected, overlooked. When you neglect one part of the circle, it affects the rest."

At Yakama, other factors have also contributed to the horse problem, including the preference among some tribal horsemen for highly bred, pedigreed animals for use in rodeos and even for status, Washines at Yakama said.

"It affects how people look at wild horses on the reservation. They are not papered, so ... they don't mean anything to anybody. It has affected the spiritual connection to the horse," Washines said. "The two biggest problems is the shutdown of the market for the horse, and the lack of interest in the horse itself.

" ... They just leave them out there and nobody thinks about them, they don't have anything to eat, they eat themselves out of their home range areas and they just stay in the same place. People say just leave them alone, they will be all right. Well, horses don't eat rocks that I know of."