This is actually a good thing (and I say this as a horse owner). It used to be legal here, and slaughterhouses were humane (well, as much as they can be) and the horses were also scanned for chips indicating that they were owned and may have been rustled from a field. When US slaughterhouses were made illegal, horses were then taken to the closest ones, in Mexico, which is both a longer trip and where conditions are probably pretty horrible.
Horses that are sent to slaughter are sometimes old work horses, but often are untameable horses (such as mustangs that somebody has bought way too late to domesticate), dangerous horses with a history of attacking human beings, and deformed or permanently injured horses from institutional settings (breeding farms, for example).
It would be much better for them to be sent to local slaughterhouses that followed US practice and also checked them to see if they were branded or chipped and if the owner was aware that the horse had been sent there. Horse rustling is still a big thing in rural areas where people leave horses out in distant pastures near the road.
I can’t really disagree that this is a good thing. Whether I eat them or not, I’m not really sure where, beyond health, the govenment has a role in the consumption of domesticated animals.
Yes, I agree. This seems to repeal a bad law, which seemed to be based on the belief that horses live forever and don't need food. Since it is a necessary function, it might as well create American jobs.