Congress, horse meat, slaughter houses, PETA and a meaningless ban.

This is crazy weird.  Republicans in the House, introduced and voted to pass HR 2112 several months ago; a similar bill was passed by the Senate earlier this month.  It then made its way through committee conference on to getting signed by President Obama on November 18th.  It was a general agricultural funding bill, but included in the bill, was appropriations for horse meat inspections, which basically legalizes horse meat processing in the US.

That set off a firestorm of criticism, two weeks after the fact.

And well, it reeks of hypocrisy that Republicans would find funding for horse meat inspectors, no?  Obviously you'll read around the internet about how Obama is responsible for legalizing horse meat consumption, but you know better than that.

So some background might be required.

A large majority of Americans have long detested the idea of horse meat used as food.

Two decades ago, Jack in the Box suffered a major public relations meltdown when it was discovered that some of its burgers had included horse and kangaroo meat from an Australian supplier.

Five years ago, the Republican Congress essentially banned the consumption of horse meat by cutting the appropriations of the meat inspectors for horse meat.  If you don't have people inspecting certain types of meat, it can't enter the food chain.

Back to 2011, and the issue rose again, and things are truly upside-down.

PETA, of all the groups you could think of, was quietly supporting HR 2112.  The logic is somewhat twisted (then again, what from PETA isn't?) because, although they want a complete ban on all meat processing and consumption, they felt that allowing the US processing of horse meat would make horse slaughtering more humane.  Twisted, no?

Within days after HR 2112 was introduced into the House, the Senate introduced a bill (S1176) to outright ban horse slaughter for the purpose of human consumption.  It seems likely that, because the Democratically controlled Senate could not extricate the funding from the House bill on the issue of horse meat inspections (and in keeping with Obama's wishes), it chose to separately introduced S1176 just days after HR2112.

In September, the House introduced HR2966 to match the Senate bill banning the slaughter of horse meat for the purpose of human consumption.

But get this: even if both bills were passed, consolidated and signed, in effect, it would still be legal to eat horse meat.  Technically speaking, Congress has allowed the inspection of imported horse meat, just not the slaughter of horse meat in the US.

So like I said, weird right?  PETA's for US slaughter houses of horses, and Congress is set to pass a ban which is rendered meaningless with its big loopholes.