Photo of Gem taken at RTF’s American Wild Horse Sanctuary by Kaitlyn Toay.
The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday included language in the Fiscal Year 2020 Agriculture Appropriations bill defunding horse slaughter inspections for another year.
This stop-gap measure has helped us keep slaughter plants inside the United States closed since 2007 as we work to pass the SAFE Act (H.R. 961 / S. 2006) to both permanently ban horse slaughter and the transport of horses, domestic and wild, over our borders for slaughter.
Return to Freedom is grateful to Sens. Tom Udall, D-N.M., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Susan Collins, R-ME, for championing the defund language, as well as to the committee’s chair, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-AL, and ranking member, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-VT, for including the anti-slaughter language in the chairman’s mark, a bipartisan package of approved amendments.
In June, the House Appropriations Committee voted to include anti-slaughter language in the base bill for the first time in more than a decade.
The annual effort to include the anti-slaughter language in the Ag funding bill has been a challenge over the past 10 years.
For Fiscal Years 2018 and 2019, for example, House appropriators did not include defund language. Fortunately, Senate appropriators chose to include the anti-slaughter language and eventually prevailed in Conference when members of the two chambers worked through the differences between their bills.