Please find an update regarding yesterday's hearing on the IL Legislation H.B. 4812 and what you can do to help. (courtesy of Animal Law Coalition)
It's Time to Remind IL Legislators of Cavel
Update Feb. 24, 2010: The
Agriculture & Conservation Committee voted after a hearing yesterday, Feb. 23, 2010, to approve H.B. 4812, a bill to repeal the 2007 ban on horse slaughter for human consumption.
The bill is already on the House calendar for second reading.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
Tell Illinois legislators: The voters in Illinois already rejected horse slaughter in 2007 and don't want to see it return to the state. Horse slaughter is cruel and has no place in American culture. The GAO and countless obsrevers have established when slaughter occurred in the U.S., horses were being slaughtered while still conscious. Think of the pain, the terror of these animals; they suffer terribly.
Tell Illinois legislators that banning horse slaughter does not lead to an increase in abandoned or unwanted horses; that is a myth and studies have shown stories planted in the media about numbers of unwanted or abandoned horses are simply false. Horse slaughter actually enables overbreeding, creating a secondary or salvage market. Horse slaughter is driven by a demand for horse meat generally consumed as a pricey delicacy in some foreign countries. 92% or more of horses purchased and sent to slaughter are healthy. This is a for profit practice that should not be subsidized by Illinois taxpayers.
It is a seedy practice that leads to an increase in horse theft, and leaves communities where slaughtering facilities have been located, with significant negative impacts ranging from nuisance odors to chronic sewer and environmental violations.
Remind Illinois legislators of Cavel
A state of the art pre-treatment system was built in DeKalb, Illinois in 2004 for the horse slaughter facility owned there by Cavel International, Inc. That horse slaughter operation even had special Industrial Waste Permits that allowed much higher (8 times higher) contamination levels for wastewater leaving the slaughter house. But, the Cavel horse slaughter house was still not in compliance. It was not out of compliance a few times. This facility was in significant non-compliance hundreds of times. This does not include the numerous safety violations documented by the FSIS.
Cavel discharged about 13,000 gallons of wastewater each day from the more than 500 horses slaughtered each week. The wastewater contained excessive levels of decomposition and waste from slaughtered horses. In one report A Cavel employee acknowledges "chunks" from slaughtered horses were oozing out of tanks.
The DeKalb Sanitary District levied a total of $80,500 for violations from 2006 until the facility was finally closed in 2007. At one point Cavel tried to avert discharge from the facility from entering the District's collection system.
As with other slaughter houses in the U.S., the Dekalb operation created no good jobs and paid no taxes; it was of no benefit at all to the community, only a detriment.
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