From Why Belgians Shoot Horses in Texas For Dining in Europe:
Christian Dhalluin, a butcher in this rural French hamlet near the Belgian border, dropped some ground meat into a bowl and mixed it with a spicy mayonnaise sauce to make his specialty: American horse meat tartare.‘I love America,’ said Mr. Dhalluin. ‘The horse meat from the U.S. is the best in the world.’
Some Americans would be distressed to hear that. A vocal antislaughter movement argues that horses have a special place in American culture and history and should not be killed for food. Activists have spurred an energetic but uphill effort in Congress to shut down the last three horse slaughterhouses in the U.S. All are Belgian-owned and supply butchers around the world.
A U.S. ban would mean that Mr. Dhalluin would no longer be able to buy the meat that vaulted him to a gold medal in a recent culinary contest for ‘best sausage in the category of garlic.’
‘Americans do not profit from slaughtering horses,’ Rep. John Sweeney, a New York Republican trying to close down the slaughterhouses, said in House debate in June. ‘Foreigners eat our horses, and foreign companies make money off the sale of meat.’
The revelation three years ago that the 1986 Kentucky Derby winner, Ferdinand, ended up in a slaughterhouse in Japan, galvanized the U.S. antislaughter movement — and caused two of the Belgian-owned plants to take on lawyers and lobbyists. ‘Toss in Mr. Ed and Black Beauty, and we have a real public-relations problem,’ says Olivier Kemseke, a Belgian horse-meat dealer whose family owns one of the Texas slaughterhouses under attack.