Wild Horses

by Gerard Emershaw

Wild horses couldn't drag me away
Wild, wild horses, we'll ride them some day

Mick Jagger/Keith Richards

In the wake of the recent Bundy ranch standoff, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is facing a wave of bad publicity. To make matters even worse, the BLM has recently been involved in a situation that has angered animal rights activists and horse lovers. The BLM rounded up a herd of horses that roamed free on federal land in northwest Wyoming and gave the horses to Wyoming state officials. In turn, the Wyoming state officials sold the 41 horses that had been rounded up to Bouvry Exports, a slaughter house in Canada, for a grand total of $1,640—$40 per animal.

Wild horses are protected by the federal government. However, the government declared that these Wyoming horses were not wild horses despite the fact that they were descendants of stray rodeo horses from the 1970s. The reason these horses were not considered wild is that they had not interbred with other wild horses.

The slaughter of horses is a big industry in Canada and Mexico, but it had effectively been banned in the United States since 2006 when the federal government ended the funding for a program of regulators or horse slaughterhouses. Congress has recently lifted the ban, and many are planning to open horse-slaughter plants around the country. There is a large international market for horse meat, which costs 40% less than beef.

Several issues are at play within the Wyoming horse slaughter story. First, the federal government has no business owning large tracts of land. In fact, owning such land is unconstitutional. The Constitution permits the federal government to purchase and control land within states only “for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings.” There are no “needful Buildings” in the wilds of Wyoming or in any other similar areas in other states. Even if it were not unconstitutional, the owning of land by the federal government should be opposed for pragmatic reasons. Government ownership of land leads to the spoil of the commons. Since there is no true owner, federally owned lands often fail to ruin. This is why devastating forest fires on federal lands are so common. Federal ownership of land also leads to corporatist arrangements by which politically connected corporations may use the land via a permit for purposes such as livestock grazing or oil drilling. Thus, federal government ownership of land leads to inefficient and unfair uses of the land.

If all land in the country were privately owned, then the herds of wild horses—including those wild horses which the federal government in its Socrates-like wisdom arbitrarily deems to not be wild enough to be wild—would all be privately owned. Some owners of these horses would simply allow them to roam wildly on their private lands. Some might even attempt to profit by making these lands into private preserves or parks where people could pay to observe and enjoy these horses. Other others might round up the wild horses and sell them to the highest bidder. Some of these horses would be bought by horse protection groups seeking to save their lives. Some would be bought by ranchers or the like seeking to attempt to domesticate them. However, many of the horses would likely be sold for slaughter.

This in turn raises the question about horse-slaughter in the United States. It was illegal, then it was effectively banned, and now it is legal again. Should the practice be legal or illegal in the United States? Given that slaughtering horses does not violate the natural rights of any American citizens or residents or any other human beings, it seems that the “crime” of horse slaughter is victimless. It appears prima facie that there can be no legal objection to slaughtering horses that one owns. With the price of beef reaching all time highs, more economical sources of meat are going to become highly sought after. While the morality of meat eating can be debated, the legality of it from a libertarian perspective cannot.

But from an ethical and psychological perspective, is there a line that must be drawn in terms of the consumption of meat? It is obvious that the slaughter of humans against their will for the purpose of consuming them as meat violates the natural rights of those individuals. But what about if some private entity wished to sell human meat as a Soylent Green delicacy and only made the corpses of willing human beings into meat? Should I be able to sell my body to be consumed as meat the same way that I can now donate my body to science? For many reasons, it seems unlikely that widespread cannibalism is going to occur within the human race. This is especially true in the West. Aside from the occasional Hannibal Lecter-like individual such as Jeffrey Dahmer, the vast majority of Americans have no desire to consume human flesh. However, if you craved human flesh, and I willed my body to you for the express purpose of having you feast upon my remains, it seems that the government should not interfere with this regardless of how distasteful it seems.

If the consumption of human flesh is even possibly permissible, then it seems that the same would be true of horse flesh. However, it is interesting to consider where Americans commonly draw the line. Even the most carnivorous Americans tend to believe that certain domestic animals are not to be consumer. For example, common pets such as cats, dogs, hamsters, gerbils, parrots and other companion birds as well as horses—which serve both as pets and as useful domestic worker animals. Cats have been useful for hundreds of years as mousers while many breeds of dog have proven useful as hunters, shepherds, guard animals, aids to the handicapped, etc. Some animals such as certain varieties of pigs as well as many other common farm animals are sometimes kept as pets and sometimes consumed as food. As distasteful as it may seem, there seems to be no justifiable reason why Americans should not be permitted to consume Shetland ponies, beagles, Persian cats, parakeets, hamsters, etc. However, it would be unsurprising if consuming certain domestic animals turned out to be psychologically harmful. While it may turn out that eating meat of any kind is unenlightened, it is even more likely that it says something very negative about a human being if he or she is willing to eat certain domesticated animals which are commonly friends and co-workers of human beings.