...my treasures do not sparkle they clink,
they shine in the sun and neigh in the night...

 

 

Slaughter of horses: comment by Italian Horse Protection on the statements made by HRH Princess Anne

21/11/2013

(19th November 2013)

Last Thursday Italian Horse Protection was invited by World Horse Welfare to attend their annual conference in London.  The theme of the conference this year was “Horses in the Next Generation”.

Generally speaking it was extremely interesting to listen to the various interventions by experts from many different areas of specialisation.  It was an invaluable opportunity to have a more direct insight into one of the biggest horse welfare associations in the world, one which IHP has for some time now been in touch with.

Among the talks given, the one by HRH Princess Anne, President of WHW caused a great stir, reported by all the main British press, and also in Italy: in a key passage of her speech she stated that creating incentives for the eating of horse meat could translate into a benefit for horses themselves.  The Princess Royal explained this statement saying that in Britain there are over 7,000 horses at risk of being abandoned, due to the economic crisis and the consequent inability of their owners to continue to care for them, and that promoting the eating of horse meat would give greater financial value to the animals and encourage owners to take better care of them, rather than abandoning them.

Given that this was more an exploratory idea than a concrete proposal, and was not a statement of an official position of WHW on the matter, we can see that it certainly holds water from the commercial/financial point of view in line with one of the classic rules of the market: the more valuable a thing is, the better care you take of it in the hope that sooner or later you will sell it as profitably as possible.
But two fundamental issues completely turn this scenario around, issues which an association of the stature of WHW cannot omit to take into account.

From the ethical point of view, we are talking here of sentient beings, not inanimate goods: thus we cannot permit reasoning solely on the grounds of utility, and therefore on ‘the lesser of two evils’ when they are no longer useful and need to be dispensed with.

From the welfare point of view, reality and facts have already in part disproved the hypothesis upon which the Princess Royal based her argument: in countries where horse meat is regularly consumed, even where the cost of the meat is higher than other meats (Italy first in Europe with France and Belgium close behind, Russia, Canada and Mexico) there is not one shred of evidence that horses are better treated compared to countries where consumption of horse meat is either low or inexistent.

Some of the measures necessary to put an end to the disastrous situation we are witnessing today have already been actively promoted for many years by WHW: discourage breeding, educate owners, set up procedures for ownership examinations for prospective horse owners, punish mistreatment and abandoning with more severe laws, set up a real, transparent registry and a single European database of horses which would make tracing possible, prohibit slaughter and put an end to the sport horse/slaughter combination.

(photo: WHW)