In today’s wildly divided political environment, we have before us a rare opportunity to come together and take action on something most of us, I think, can agree on — that would be protecting horses from maiming and torture. These proposed protections are widely supported by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle as well as much of the nation’s horse industry, veterinary, and animal welfare communities.
The issue is that of horse “soring” — a cruel, deliberate practice in which trainers in the Tennessee walking, racking and spotted saddle horse industry use an array of chemicals and devices that cause great pain to the animals’ legs and hooves. Soring is real, it’s been around forever, and it is unspeakably cruel. All for the pursuit of a blue ribbon!
Congress passed the Horse Protection Act in 1970 with the goal of ending soring, but weak regulations and sporadic enforcement by the USDA have allowed the practice to continue. Current regulations allow the conflict-ridden industry to largely police itself, with USDA officials getting to only about 20% of the events covered under the Act. Devices are still allowed in the show ring that are integral to the soring process — metal chains that bang against horses’ chemically sored legs, and tall, heavy platform shoes that force the horse to move in an unnatural exaggerated gait known as the “big lick” and that hide intentional damage caused to the horses’ hooves.
Nearly half a century after the act’s passage, in the closing days of the Obama/Biden administration under its Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, the USDA finally stepped up in 2017 to close those loopholes. A rule that was years in the making and had the support of over 100,000 members of the public (including letters signed by 42 senators and 182 representatives) was finalized and noticed to the public — but not published in the Federal Register. The incoming Trump administration froze this rule and all others that had not yet been published, and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue sat on it for four years.
Throughout this time, bipartisan support has continued for reinstatement of the 2017 rule and the agency moving forward with a strong new rule that Vilsack has been promising since late 2021, communicated through letters to him from the Hill and appropriations bill report language calling for the same.
What’s baffling is why, with such broad bipartisan support, the Biden administration’s USDA under Vilsack has not moved swiftly to reinstate their 2017 rule or implement a new one that protects horses, given that the 2017 rule was finalized under those players.
Instead, following a ruling in federal court that the agency withdrew the 2017 rule unlawfully and an order to either reinstate it or withdraw it by taking the legally required steps, the USDA has simply opted to do the latter, with no commitment to replace the rule and the current failed system of enforcement with anything that will end the suffering inflicted on the victims of soring.
This is despite the fact that the USDA’s own recently-released 2022 impact report states that its inspectors found that 25% of the horses they examined at shows last year were out of compliance with the Act. Fifty percent of the samples taken from the ankles of horses to check for prohibited substances were found to contain numbing agents — used to deaden the horses’ pain response when examined for evidence of soring.
It’s been circulating in Washington that Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) has been holding up Agriculture Department nominations to stall the implementation of a Horse Protection rule. It’s also anticipated that he intends to introduce legislation that would codify, rather than fix, many of the problems with the Act — blocking the USDA from implementing any of the reforms that it planned to in the 2017 rule.
Hagerty and the other senators from Tennessee and Kentucky have opposed and blocked Senate passage of the widely-supported Prevent All Soring Tactics (PAST) Act — a bill the House passed in the last two Congresses by a wide bipartisan margin. One must wonder why Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Marsha Blackburn, and Hagerty are so determined to block reform, doing the bidding of those who torture horses for sport.
The USDA’s planned withdrawal of the 2017 Horse Protection rule is a depressing step backward. If the agency is hell-bent on doing so, it should commit to replacing the rule with an equally strong (or stronger) rule… and implement it without delay.
There’s currently a public comment period open until August 21 where you can be heard. I’ll be weighing in to tell the USDA to stop allowing horses to be victimized by scofflaws, and either reinstate the 2017 rule or commit to a timeline for implementation of a strong new rule. I encourage like-minded animal lovers — “horse people” in particular — to do the same. And tell a friend!
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