Horse sense.

When I was growing up and showing animals in 4-H and FFA, we had training on how to deal with animal rights activists if they approached us at county or state fairs. I was accosted one year at the Missouri State Fair, and words cannot even describe how surprised and hurt I was. People, who have absolutely. no. inkling. of who I am or how I treat my animals, in my face, telling me what a horrible person I am. Did they know I feed my animals a very precise nutritional diet twice a day, every single day? Did they know I trained them, worked with them, and brushed them every single day? Did they know I bathed my animals regularly? Did they know that I was showing that particular animal because I was proud of it? Why then, would I treat it badly? I invited them to help me take care of my animals for a couple of days and show me how they think I should be treating them. They (surprise!) declined.

So now, I hear this news. There are no more horse slaughter plants in the United States. I have mixed feelings about this information. On the one hand, horses are beautiful, useful creatures and it makes me sad thinking about them being killed for meat. But on the other hand, when horses get old, what else can a person do with them? I know a lot of farmers who use horses to work with their cattle. The horses end up being a family pet, and the farmers get really attached to them. But they also have to look at their horses from a practical point of view: when the horse gets old and can't help them on the farm anymore, you have to do something with it. You can't just keep it around, because you probably need the money to buy a new horse. So you sell it to a packer. It's sad, but it's a fact of life. I also can't help but think, if a horse can be useful, isn't it better to use it than have it just die on your farm and not be useful to anyone?

But, no matter what my opinion is of it, here again, animal rights groups have gotten into something they should have thought more about. Now, because the groups have spent a lot of time and energy literally attacking horse slaughter plants, there aren't any more in the U.S. The interesting twist to this is that now horses are being sent to slaughter plants in Mexico.

Mexico, where they have absolutely no regulations on treating animals humanely. Nice going, rights groups.