The modern riding horse is 1000 pound flight animal, able to deliver a lethal kick especially when the foot is armored with steel horseshoes, dominated by a herd instinct, and possessed of the brain of a duck. Things can go wrong amazingly fast, I know, I have the operations to prove it.
Yet the beast is a noble creature and one deservedly romanticized in folklore and literature. The problem often is that it is not only inexperienced riders who can get in trouble around horses but ignorant legislators and regulators. It may be that the worst thing that ever happened to the species came from impulses to anthropomorphize an animal which affects the thinking of do-gooders who have read, "Black Beauty" and seen, "National Velvet."
Acting out of the highest of motives, these people have made slaughter of horses for consumption of meat illegal resulting in untold suffering for horses all over America. A lesson in unintended consequences which invariably occur when a government sets out to do good.
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This is one of a series of reports which has been occurring intermittently now for a couple of years as the unintended consequences of liberal follies which bring real and acute misery to these poor beasts.
Ignorant liberals have outlawed horse slaughter which produces meat for human consumption. Instead of policing the slaughterhouse and ensuring that the slaughter is done humanely they have so fouled up the marketplace that the poor animals are suffering terribly. Liberals have driven the price of feed through the roof because of the subsidies of biofuels and so the market is flooded with horses that people cannot afford to feed. Nor can they sell them. Many cannot afford to have a veterinarian euthanize them and dispose of the carcass. So the liberals have squeezed this traditional American relationship between man and horse from both sides and caused untold agony to the poor creatures. Many horses are trucked in indescribable conditions without water to Mexico for a thousand miles to slaughter.
If there ever was a example of the law of unintended consequences this surely must be a flagrant example. Liberals simply cannot refrain from doing good and they have done so much good on both sides of the equation that horses are suffering horrible and lingering deaths. For some incomprehensible reason they have eliminated slaughter to produce food for consumption. I cannot imagine why. If they thought they were eliminating the problem of inhumane slaughter, why did they not police the slaughter and ensure through inspections that it was done humanely? Did they think the horses would live for ever?
On the other end, liberals had more good to do. They jiggered the agricultural economy of America by subsidizing the burning of food for fuel and thus driving the cost of feed for horses beyond the ability of many horse lovers to properly maintain their stock and thus dumping tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of horses onto a market which could not absorb them. The good they were doing? The dubious elimination of consumption of fossil fuels for the even more dubious threat of global warming in the fatuously dubious hope that man can control the weather.
God knows what other intended consequences liberals will generate trying to undo these unintended consequences. If there is such a thing as eternal justice, these Libs ought to be investigating the doctrines of repentance and foregiveness.
Instead of horses, think human beings, think the entire American economy and get a feel for the harm liberals do when they do good.
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For all of American history up until about 1950 when the postwar economic miracle began, the bulk of Americans lived in a land of scarcity as compared to today. My father was born in 1911, survived the depression, served in World War II, and never had surplus money until well into the 1950s.
Those of us who live carelessly in the midst of plenty are quick to judge the parsimoniousness of previous generations. The reality of farming, for example, was so much different before tractors came into widespread use. My father said that he could earn a dollar a day for himself and an additional two dollars a day for his team of horses. One has to understand that in order to feed those horses land had to be dedicated for pasture and for crops and many man-hours had to be devoted to planting, harvesting, storing and feeding these animals. Even for a relatively prosperous farmer as his family was, there was precious little surplus, even these farmers lived with the specter of hunger and want. The effort required and the margins available made the risks very great as the Great Depression was to demonstrate.
It is easy to project the mindset of the 21st century into the turn of the last century and our understanding might well be faulty and our judgments might well be harsh. For example, child labor was not exploited out of sadistic mindsets but because people were poor in an age without surplus. Some slavers were sadists but many were trapped much like a businessman today in America who declines to hire cheap illegal labor and finds himself unable to compete with his competitors. If land was taken from the Indians, land was the means by which the very poor could establish their independence in an agricultural age. Very few acres were needed to support a family of whites but hundreds or thousands of acres were required to support a family of Indians. We ought not to cast judgment without understanding the basic elements of survival in that time and place.
I believe that Marxists today trade on this ignorance when they consciously denigrate America, its history and values in order to facilitate its "transformation."
