Straight from the Horse's Heart

Op-Ed by R.T. Fitch – author of “Straight from the Horse’s Heart“

In My Humble Opinion

He drives me NUTS!

It’s like the movie “Groundhog’s Day” on steroids, the nightmare just won’t go away.  You heard it once, you heard it a dozen times and the words buzz around your head like an old melody that you just can’t get rid of.  It leaves a bad after taste in our mouth, a tension in your chest and a royal pain in your backside.  What/Whom are we speaking of?  Why Montana’s father of horse slaughter, Rep. “Red” Ed Butcher, of course.

Last week we reported that “Red’ Ed had decided not to run for re-election and the world gave off a collective sigh of relief, but just when you thought it was safe to let the kids play outside and to release your horses out of the barn ole “Red” Ed shares his “plans for the future”.  It just goes from dumber to dumbest.

In a recent interview with James Adams of the Great Falls Tribune ole “Red” Ed outlined several of his plans for the future.

“Identifying foreign horse meat markets and promoting the processing plants are my first priorities,” Butcher said. “The real issue is the horse industry is going to die in the United States if we don’t get some processing plants. We really need to focus this next year to see if we can get a market online and some place to go with these excess horses.“

Okay, maybe it’s me but I thought that I had paid attention during the class of “Business 101”.  If you want to start a viable business should you not first:

• Have a viable market?
• Ensure that the business is legal?
• Have a means in which to ship your product?
• Ensure that your product would not harm the consumer?
• Blah, blah, blah, blah?

I don’t know, maybe I am looking at things backwards and ole “Red” Ed knows something that I don’t know.  Perhaps he has an inside scoop on how to get someone (Communist China) to invest millions in building a plant to kill the mythical unwanted horse that is against federal law to ship across state lines to a shrinking market that is being shut down due concerns of drug contamination.  Am I missing something here? (Sure glad this guy isn’t managing my retirement plan)

Point is “Red” Ed refuses to simply go off quietly into the night now that he has made a mockery of himself and become an embarrassment to the great state of Montana.  He is a lame duck legislator and impotent to the max as he will no longer  be able to sponsor any additional destructive and damming legislation.  Now the only way that he can feed his ego is to bark nonsense into the megaphone of the local press. Maybe the best way to stop the stupidity is simply not to give him an audience.

So with that said, we bid farewell to the mouthpiece of predatory horse slaughter and hope that his alter-ego and traveling companion, Wyoming Rep. “Slaughterhouse” Sue Wallis soon follows suit and becomes nothing more than a dim memory of a very bad and distasteful nightmare.

The day has just become a little brighter for the horses.