Help needed for unwanted horses

I hope the tragic accident of horses killed in an accident will bring to light the recent legislation regarding the shutting down of slaughterhouses in our country.

As I see it, the horse industry is like any other, there is excess and surplus and the bad part, it involves living, breathing creatures. There will always be unwanted, aged or crippled horses that will have no homes to go to. Horse lovers decry the use of slaughter horses for table food; humane agencies try to save these hapless animals and lobby Washington to end the slaughter.

Yet therein lies the problem. In prohibiting these horses from going to USDA-regulated slaughterhouses in Illinois and other states, they leave the problem to auction houses, killer buyers and truckers. What do you think the end result will be? The real problem is our leaders in Washington who pacify lobbyists without examining the end result or putting a program into place to replace the slaughterhouses that fill a need, however grim, to take care of animals no one wants.

So, step up to the plate, politicians. Create horse shelters that protect and put up for adoption the mass of unwanted horses. Humanely euthanize old or crippled horses, and stop making these horses ride hours on cramped trailers to Mexico and Canada for their final journey.

You've swept this one under the rug … for now, but you can blame yourselves for the misery of thousands of horses -- many very young -- who for no better reason than being unwanted are put through tortuous travel to be killed outside of America.

I visualize a program that healthy, albeit unwanted horses are kept on fenced acreage with food and shelter until someone comes along and adopts one for a reasonable fee. Subsidize it like any other program out there to protect our animals. Put the weight of the unwanted horses in America back on the shoulders of whom it belongs … the horse enthusiast. And frankly, I think they'll come through.

Cindy Seng

Libertyville