Horse Slaughter Research Paper

Every year, well over 170,000 equines from the United States are slaughtered for human consumption to satisfy the taste for horsemeat in Europe and Japan where it is considered a delicacy. It doesn’t matter where they came from- pets, show and race horses, carriage horses, and wild horses—end up in slaughterhouses every year. They sell from as low as $15 per pound, to as high as $25 per pound. Most horses at a slaughterhouse don’t make it to the next week, they are not fed, they live in disgusting grounds and put into very small corrals. However, some get to have another chance at life, they are bought and kept as pets, or even turn to be show horses. Over the next few paragraphs, I will be discussing how they get to their destinations, the …show more content…
A horse is killed in a way that is easiest and quickest for the slaughterhouse worker but most agonizing for the horse. The first step is to stun them with a bolt that penetrates the skull, enters the cranium, and catastrophically damages the cerebrum and part of the cerebellum, causing them to be temporarily “knocked out.” They then go through a “Kill Chute,” to a “Kill Floor.” Horses arriving on the kill floor from the kill chute, they are hoisted by a chain attached to a hind leg, their throats slit and bled out. However some horses often wake up, and go through the whole thing consciously. Once a horse is bled out, his hooves are sawed off or removed with cutters, decapitated, skinned, dismembered, and butchered. A 2007 investigation by The San Antonio News-Express revealed that slaughterhouses in Mexico use a "puntilla" knife to severe the spines of horses prior to slaughter. In Canada, the horses are simply shot with a bullet from a gun. Workers were caught standing at inappropriate angles, making inaccurate shots, some failing to strike their targets to the degree that the terrified horses were able to scramble to their feet to try to