Equine Welfare Alliance has issued an update on the Moran Amendment:

Now that the Moran-Young amendment has cleared the committee, it is no longer an amendment but part of the bill. Be sure to thank Bill Young (R-FL) along with Jim for introducing the amendment. Of note, is the House bill has further reduced the inspection budget by $31M dollars.

Normally, once the house passes the bill, it moves to the senate but we hear the senate mark-up on the bill will be tomorrow so the mark-up will start before the house votes on their bill. The full committee is scheduled to hear the bill on Thursday. We do not know if the senate committee will adopt the President’s recommended budget (this contains the defunding language) or they will draft their own bill.

Your suggested message to the senate subcommittee and full committee is: Please ensure the Senate bill contains language to defund horse inspections or please ensure the senate bill does not include funding for horse inspections. That’s all!

If the language is included in the subcommittee mark-up, there is a good chance it will pass out of the full committee with the language intact.

Should you become engaged in a dialog as to why you support this, here are suggested talking points….

Food safety and wisely using our tax dollars. It is a waste of US taxpayer dollars to inspect animals that are not raised or regulated as food animals. The US should not allow non-food animals to enter the food chain in the US or in foreign countries not to mention the possibility of the recent European meat scandal happening in the US with our beef supply. With budgets being slashed, our USDA inspectors should be solely focused on inspecting our food supply.

Keep in mind this is a financial bill so that should be the focus of any communications unless, of course, you are asked about other issues surrounding food safety and horse slaughter. If you have any questions or need information, please visit our website or email us at ewa@equinewelfarealliance.org.

Committee Contact Info:

I’m not sure who created this document (thank you!) but I took the information and added the state, party and noted the subcommittee members (check mark in the first column). The document is sorted by state and has two pages – the first page is phone info and the second page has web information. You can take the zoom up for the second page as I had to shrink the print to get it to fit on one page.

http://www.equinewelfarealliance.org/uploads/AG.S.AC.pdf