Congress is choosing lobbyists over voters, and could re-legalize horse slaughter

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Horse slaughter is wildly unpopular with the American public, yet Congress is poised to pass a farm bill which could quietly re-legalize it nationwide. The Save Our Bacon (SOB) Act is a controversial provision tucked into the House farm bill, designed to override state-level protections against the cruel confinement of pigs. However, it carries dangerous collateral consequences: its sweeping language could nullify over 600 state and local animal welfare laws, including long-standing bans on horse slaughter.

The SOB Act is a dream for Big Ag lobbyists, but a nightmare in all other respects. On the federalism front, it would completely usurp the will of voters, even overturning laws enacted by ballot measure. Additionally, the provision has drawn criticism from both right and left for the cruelty it would subject farmed animals to, as well as the negative impact it would have on small farmers trying to compete with industrial factory farms. And since polling shows 80 percent of Americans are against horse slaughter, passing a farm bill containing the SOB language risks even more bipartisan backlash than Congress has bargained for.

The House of Representatives in large part chose to look away from the animal welfare implications of SOB, even blocking a vote on Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s (R-Fla.) amendment, which sought to strip it out of the House farm bill.

While the Senate Agriculture Committee has deemed the SOB language too controversial to be included in the base text of the Senate farm bill, Iowa Republican Sens. Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley are expected to fight to add this language as an amendment. As Grassley said, “It’s got to be in the farm bill or it won’t get done.”

In the 1980s, at the height of domestic horse slaughter in the United States, over 300,000 horses were killed annually at 16 federally inspected plants. But strong bipartisan opposition caused many states, including Texas in 1949, Georgia in 1974, California in 1998, Illinois in 2007, Florida in 2010, New Jersey in 2012, and New York in 2023, to enact bans preventing the practice within their borders.

In 2005, Congress effectively ended horse slaughter nationwide by prohibiting funding for Agriculture Department slaughter facility inspections through the annual appropriations process, although loopholes allowed the practice to continue until 2007.

When Congress briefly lifted the federal prohibition in 2011, the Agriculture Department assured the public that domestic slaughter would not resume because state-level bans remained firmly in place.

Now, however, the dangerously broad language in the SOB Act threatens to undo those very state-level protections, leaving horses entirely vulnerable. If the Senate allows SOB into their farm bill, we could quickly end up right back at square one.

It’s not unrealistic to imagine a future where domestic horse slaughter is revived. The international demand for horse meat is still prevalent, and to this day, despite the existing legal limitations, “kill buyers” purchase approximately 20,000 of America’s unwanted horses annually and ship them across our borders to Mexico and Canada to be slaughtered and sold by the pound.

The horses bound for slaughter are former children’s ponies, farm horses, athletes, ex-racehorses, family pets — even wild horses that slipped into the slaughter pipeline via the Bureau of Land Management’s “Sale Authority Program.” The overwhelming majority of them could continue living happy, productive lives if given the opportunity, which is one reason veterinarians, animal welfare organizations, and equine industry leaders have devoted so many decades to ending the cruelty of slaughter.

While proponents argue “processing” provides unwanted horses with a useful end, in reality it not only normalizes inhumane treatment, it also incentivizes poor stewardship by providing a profitable method of disposal. Reviving domestic slaughter would therefore only further perpetuate the overpopulation problem, while stirring up fierce bipartisan backlash.

While the farm bill always involves complex policy trade-offs, re-legalizing horse slaughter is where the public draws a definitive line. Voters across the political spectrum recognize the unique importance of horses to both American history and modern life, and though they may disagree on other aspects of agricultural policy, they nevertheless stand united against sending horses into the slaughter pipeline.

The right path forward for the Senate is to honor the clear will of the electorate and protect state-level authority from being overridden by corporate special interests. To streamline the farm bill’s passage and avoid angering a large bipartisan majority of their constituency, senators must ensure the Save Our Bacon language is excluded from the farm bill.

Meghan Miller is senior fellow at the Wilberforce Institute.

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Rep. Anna Paulina Luna

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