Rethinking humane treatment of horses A4 Thursday, April 26, 2012
OPINION
Some months ago, there seemed to be an increase in news stories about mistreated horses: horses starving on drought-blighted open range or neglected in toosmall private fields. Horses are such noble animals, I had always thought. How can anybody mistreat a horse? A rancher told me this was happening because of federal regulatory changes that forced the closure of all U.S. horse slaughterhouses. There was no simple way to dispose of a no-longer-useful horse. Inhumane treatment of horses is back in New Mexico news. An animal advocacy group took video of sick and dying horses at an auction facility in Los Lunas. Then it was announced that horse slaughter would once again be legal, because Congress had restored the funding for agriculture inspectors; a few days later, a Roswell slaughterhouse owner
EDITORIAL
MERILEE
DANNEMANN TRIPLE SPACED
applied to slaughter horses; and the protests started. According to some accounts, conditions for horses in transport and in the slaughterhouse were pretty horrible. The unintended consequences of banning U.S. slaughter were worse. Horses were shipped to Mexico or Canada in crowded trucks with no food or water. The video of the corral in Los Lunas was heartbreaking enough. Imagine those same sick horses forced to travel in such conditions. Without slaughter, the legal choices were to take care of the
Roswell Daily Record
animal until its natural death, have it humanely euthanized and then dispose of the carcass in a legal manner, or take it to a statelicensed horse rescue farm. Horse rescue farms are a great solution, except that the website of the New Mexico Livestock Board lists just nine of them, and they reportedly house no more than 20 to 60 horses each. Unwanted horses in the United States are said to number 100,000 or more. There are no accurate numbers for New Mexico. Some people confine horses in tiny enclosures; uncounted thousands roam on drought-stricken public lands and Indian reservations, where they compete with each other, wildlife and livestock for scarce food and water. Who can say whether a slow death from thirst and starvation is preferable to slaughter? The owner of a rescue farm talked to me on condition that I
say nothing about her identity or location. She gets up some mornings and finds a newly abandoned horse tied to her fence. She has no room for more. Others who talked to me didn’t want to be quoted because, reasonably or not, they fear animal-rights extremists. Surprisingly, news reports said PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), reputed animal rights radicals, supported the reintroduction of slaughter in the U.S., because it’s better than the treatment of horses trafficked across the border. But the Humane Society of the United States said, prior to the Roswell announcement, that anyone trying to open a horse slaughterhouse “will face pressure.” It argues that horses slaughtered are not only the old and lame but perfectly healthy horses. There will be new initiatives to ban slaughter again. I’m not sure
whether meat from a sick horse can be sold for human consumption. I would hope that if slaughter resumes, states can put regulations in place to assure that both transport and slaughter are done humanely. Of course, we humans don’t always treat other humans humanely, and there is no space in this column to talk about other animals in agribusiness. As with so many issues of public policy, we attempt to do the right thing but don’t go far enough. The issue in total is humane treatment of animals, including those nearing the end of life. Whether slaughter resumes or is stopped again, I would hope our policy makers could go the whole way and develop a complete plan that is fully consistent with the ideals it professes to embrace. Contact Merilee Dannemann at www.triplespacedagain.com. © New Mexico News Services 2012
Greenpeace has a beef with Apple
As soon as a company achieves a certain amount of success, it often begins attracting the attention of bureaucratic government regulators and special-interest groups. President Ronald Reagan understood this all too well when he said, “Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” We’ve alr eady denounced the U.S. Department of Justice for its lawsuit against the world’s most successful and valuable company, Apple Inc., for allegedly colluding with publishers to fix the price of e-books. Now the environmental special interests — namely Greenpeace — have taken a shot at Apple, claiming its data centers, which host things like the company’s popular cloud services, are not green enough. When you visit the Greenpeace website, here is what it says: “Giant data centres, which store and send the terabytes of pictures, emails, songs and streaming videos we enjoy every day, are now one of the fastest growing sources of new electricity demand in the world. “Every day, tons of asthma-inducing, climate-destr oying coal pollution is thrown in the air to keep the Internet humming.” That’s a nice way to treat a veritable geyser of job creation and tax-revenue generation. Robert McMillan, writing for Wired.com, detailed the criticism made by the environmental group: “Greenpeace released a report calling Apple’s data center a power-hungry threat to the environment,” claiming the company’s Maiden, North Carolina-based center is burning too many megawatts of power. Apple isn’t the only target. Microsoft and Amazon ar e on the hit-list, too. Greenpeace’s environmental activism soared to new heights (literally) last week when two activists “rappelled from the roof of a still-under-construction Amazon building” in Seattle, as reported by the Seattle Times. The banner read, “Amazon Microsoft, how clean is your cloud?” In California, we know all too well how powerful the environmental special interests have become. They hamstring development and hinder job creation because of their zealotry. In Orange County, projects like the Huntington Beach Seawater Desalination Project and the completion of the 241 Toll Road have been delayed in part due to radical envir onmental activists. While care and stewardship for the environment are laudable social values, Greenpeace takes matters to an unproductive extreme, putting their ideology before people. Their assaults against Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are just the latest example. Guest Editorial The Orange County Register DEAR DOCTOR K: I have a heart arrhythmia. My doctor wants me to get an ICD. What do I need to know before agreeing to get one? DEAR READER: ICD stands for “implantable cardioverterdefibrillator.” It is a small device that is surgically placed in your body. An ICD can save your life — but it can also complicate your life. Why was the ICD developed? Sometimes the heart develops dangerous irregular rhythms. Two, in particular, are lifethreatening. The most dangerous is ventricular fibrillation (VF). When a heart develops VF, it stops pumping. It just quivers; it’s in cardiac arrest. With no blood circulating to your brain, you lose con-
The government assault on food JOHN STOSSEL CREATORS SYNDICATE
Instinct tells us to fear poison. If our ancestors were not cautious about what they put in their mouths, they would not have survived long enough to produce us. Unfortunately, a side effect of that cautious impulse is that whenever someone claims that some chemical — or food ingredient, like fat — is a menace, we are primed to believe it. That makes it easy for government to leap in and play the role of protector. But for every study that
Doonesbury
ASK DR. K UNITED MEDIA SYNDICATE
sciousness. If no blood reaches your brain for more than 4 minutes, your brain dies. Another dangerous rhythm is ventricular tachycardia (VT). Your heart beats rapidly, and your blood still circulates — though less effectively than with a regular rhythm. Unfortunately, if VT is not corrected, it often turns into VF. About 60 years ago, Harvard
says X is bad for you, another study disagrees. How is a layman to decide? I used to take consumer activists’ word for it. Heck, they want to save the world, while industry just wants to get rich. Now I know better. The activists want money, too — and fame. To arbitrate, it’s intuitive to turn to government — except government scientists have conflicts, too. Who becomes a regulator except people who want to regulate? Some come from activist groups that hate industry. Some come from industry and want to convert
doctors invented the defibrillator, a machine that delivers a shock to the heart. They showed that the shock could quickly return a dangerous heart rhythm to normal. The shock was delivered by two paddles placed on a patient’s chest. Obviously, the defibrillator could help you only if your dangerous heart rhythm was diagnosed and treated within minutes of its starting. You had to be in a medical setting, or emergency medical technicians had to get to you very quickly. In recent years, machines to deliver these shocks are also located at airports, on airplanes and in other public places. Still, most people who develop VT or VF are nowhere
their government job into a higher -paying industry job. Some just want attention. They know that saying, “X will kill you,” gets more attention than saying that X is probably safe. I don’t suggest that we ignore the experts and eat like pigs. But the scientific question should not overshadow the more fundamental issue. Who should decide what you can eat: you? Or the state? Should gover nment decide what we may eat, any more than it decides where we live or how long our hair will be? The Food Police claim that
near a defibrillator. Enter the ICD, which has two basic functions. First, it reads your heart rhythm and spots a potentially dangerous one. Second, it sends a jolt of electricity to your heart muscle to end the dangerous rhythm and restore a normal rhythm. The only people for whom an ICD is recommended are people who have had VT or VF, or who have a heart condition that greatly increases their risk of developing these dangerous rhythms. When you have an ICD placed in your body, it’s as if the doctor with the paddles is always with you. It can be lifesaving. However, some people See DR. K, Page A5
they just want to help us make informed choices. But that’s not all they want to do. They try to get government to force us to make healthy choices. The moral issue of force versus persuasion applies even if all the progressives’ ideas about nutrition are correct. Even if I would be better off eating no fat and salt, that would not justify forcing restaurants to stop serving me those things. Either we live in a free society or we don’t. It is no coincidence that the
25 YEARS AGO
See STOSSEL, Page A5
April 26, 1987 • Marine Sgt. Pedro Hernandez, formerly of Roswell, has been awarded the Meritorious Unit Commendation Medal. From June 1, 1984, to May 31, 1985, the Marine Fighter Attack T raining Squadron 101 at the Marine Corps Air Station provided Fleet Marine Forces with a substantial increase in combat readiness aircrews through strong leadership, maintenance, safety awareness and increased training efficiency. Hernandez is serving with the 3rd Marine Aircraft wing at the Marine Corps Air Station. Hernandez, 36, son of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Hernandez, formerly of Roswell, is a 1970 graduate of Goddard High School. He joined the Marines in August 1970. His wife, Sophia, is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Adolph Castrillo of Roswell.