Alex Atamanenko, MP for BC Southern Interior, is celebrating the third anti-horse slaughter billboard that has just been erected, this time in Port Coquitlam, by the US based Angel Acres and supported by the Canadian Horse Defence Coalition. Two other billboards with the same message “Stop Slaughtering Us” are located in Ottawa and Calgary.
“There is a long list of reasons why business of selling horsemeat for human consumption should not exist,” stated the NDP MP. “I am confident that the billboard’s powerful message will direct public attention and outrage to a business that is unhealthy, unnecessary and morally reprehensible.”
Atamanenko has championed this cause with his private members bill C-322 (Slaughter of Horses for Human Consumption). Thousands of people have petitioned the government in support of this bill in the hopes of shutting down the industry. Tens of thousands of horses are delivered to Canadian slaughterhouses each year from the US where horse slaughter is illegal.
“The horse slaughter industry would like you to think they are a necessary evil and that just like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals they go around rescuing old, sick and abandoned horses from abusive situations right across Canada and the US,” said Atamanenko. “The reality is that kill buyers pick up horses that were raised, medicated and put up for sale for any number of reasons at auction and elsewhere across Canada and the United States to service a horsemeat market in the EU and Canada.”
Atamanenko says the cruel and inhumane way in which they are then transported and slaughtered has repeatedly been revealed in undercover investigations and reports such as “Pasture to Plate”, which is available on the Canadian Horse Defence Coalition website.
“Also, drugs that are strictly prohibited in food animals such as ‘phenylbutazone’ (nicknamed ‘horse’s aspirin’) are commonly administered to horses with only a small amount tested,” concluded Atamanenko. “I urge everyone in BC Southern Interior to learn more and do whatever they can to help shut this industry down.”