Animal welfare rally calls for end to horse exportation

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This article was published 12/06/2022 (1212 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Animal lovers from across the city gathered at the Legislative Building Saturday afternoon to call on the Liberal government to halt the exportation and slaughter of horses.

Supported by a rescue horse named Dayo, around 100 people gathered carrying signs with slogans including “Canada ships horses to their death” and “We are betraying Canada’s gentle giants.” The protest was the first of its kind, one the Winnipeg Humane Society had hoped they wouldn’t have to organize after the federal Liberals and Agricultural and Agri-Foods Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau pledged to ban horse exportation late last year.

“Purposefully breeding draft horses and shipping them overseas for slaughter is the ultimate betrayal after all they have done for us in the last few centuries,” Humane Society CEO Jessica Miller said to the crowd. “We will not sit idly by and let this inhumane practice continue.”

Winnipeg’s Richardson International Airport is one of three Canadian airports that currently assists in exporting horses, and as many as 5,000 horses are shipped overseas for slaughter in Canada yearly.

Horses are bred specifically for export and are typically used as meat, particularly in Japan, France and the U.S., where there is a high market demand for fresh horse meat. These horses are purposely fattened before being slaughtered. The process of transporting the horses is traumatic for them, Miller said, as they have to endure 30-plus hour travel time without food, water or rest.

The U.S. banned horse slaughter in 2007, but around 13,000 horses are imported into Canada from the U.S. for slaughter annually. Roughly 25,000 horses are slaughtered in Canada every year.

Winnipeg-based animal rights lawyer Kaitlyn Mitchell has filed more than one law enforcement complaint while witnessing horses be loaded on to flights, where she said they were jabbed with metal poles and put in cramped wooden crates.

“I’ve been to the airport, I’ve been there over and over again to watch these horses arrive in trucks and be unloaded, and for nothing, all to be shipped across the world in order to be slaughtered and eaten as a delicacy,” she said. “It’s heartbreaking.”

She said she’s reached out to federal and provincial leaders on the issue with no response.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for a ban on live horse exports for slaughter, along with other requests, in a mandate to Bibeau in December. Change hasn’t come quickly enough and horses continue to be exported, Mitchell said.

“We are grateful that the federal government has committed to banning this practice, but the time to act is now,” she said.

“Not another horse should be subjected to this cruel treatment.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca