Editorial: Wild horse protection intact

Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005 | 8:40 a.m.

A congressional committee late Wednesday afternoon kept intact a controversial measure that cripples slaughterhouses that render meat from America's federally protected wild horses.

It was an unexpected turnaround for members of the House-Senate conference committee who, sources told the Las Vegas Sun, were planning to quietly remove from a broader agriculture spending bill the measure that would ban funding for federal inspectors at the nation's three slaughterhouses. The ban would effectively close the plants, which process horse meat for sale overseas.

The legislation creating the ban, sponsored by Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., was passed by overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate. It is part of the agriculture bill passed Wednesday by the conference committee chaired by Rep. Henry Bonilla, R-Texas. Two of the three slaughterhouses affected are in Texas.

Sources told the Sun earlier this week that some committee members had considered exercising parliamentary rules that would have allowed them to remove the provision without public debate. Bonilla had rejected other committee members' demands to publicly discuss the removal.

It would have marked the second time in a year that lawmakers had tried to quietly unravel protections afforded to wild horses under the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act. An amendment slipped into the 2005 Omnibus Appropriations Bill last November allowed the federal government to sell certain wild horses to any buyer -- including a slaughterhouse. In April, 41 formerly protected horses were sold to slaughter.

Those who opposed Ensign's provision said the ban would simply result in horses being sent to Mexico or Canada for slaughter and "will not produce American jobs or American income."

There are better jobs for Americans than slaughtering aging pets or federally protected wild horses for human consumption. Fortunately, the panel decided that honoring the desires of an overwhelming majority of Congress was more important than protecting that practice.