Well said. I have a hunting camp on a farm I go to every weekend. I do not understand the “They are just animals crowd”. Even if you are going to raise animals to eat them, you can treat the well. And I fully agree with your statement. People that are kind to animals, are kind people. People that think little of animal life, think little of life.
The “They are just animals crowd” simply is reacting to the PETA control-freaks. That’s what led to my “walk and chew gum” comment: you can hold the opinion that it is preferable to slaughter these animals in a centralized and convenient location instead of trucking them to Mexico where anything can happen, without becoming someone who throws paint at people wearing fur coats.
I don’t know how we went from “treating animals like humans” to “treating them with dignity”.
Not that I think dignity is the right word to use either, but you can treat an animal with “dignity”, without pretending they are humans.
Oddly, a better term might be “humanely”. But the argument against slaughterhouses wasn’t just about inhumane treatment, it was about the idea of killing horses and then using the meat as food.
What you do with the remains has nothing to do with “humane” treatment (which is why it’s a better word than “with dignity” — which could imply that they deserve some special attention after death; we would say “treat the remains with dignity” if we were talking about human remains, but who cares what you do with a dead animal, within reason? It’s dead, it doesn’t have a soul, it’s relatives and family could care less what you do.
So kill the horses humanely, and then do what you want with the remains. That’s a more reasonable approach than shutting down the processing. Horses still have some uses, but the time when they were all virtually more valuable alive than as food is gone, at least in this country, where we have cars.