Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn has represented Middle and West Tennessee for nearly two decades in the House and had dozens of opportunities to help enact much-needed national policies to combat animal cruelty. In almost every case, she’s taken the opposite tack and sided with dark money and special interests that have pushed for the status quo or even rolled back past gains for animals. Now Blackburn is seeking a seat in the U.S. Senate, which would give her even more political power and influence. There’s no mistaking that she’s a forbidding threat to a raft of animal protection policies that will be debated in the Senate in the years to come.
Blackburn has taken the reins in leading opposition to legislation to crack down on the barbaric practice of soring Tennessee Walking Horses, the intentional infliction of pain to horses’ front feet that causes them to perform an exaggerated gait known as the “Big Lick.” She’s accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from those involved in this corrupt enterprise, including from known violators of the Horse Protection Act. She’s denied that this peculiar form of cruelty is rampant even in the face of overwhelming evidence documenting abuses in Tennessee.
After seeing a bill introduced to impose strict standards to stop decades of abuse – with the Prevent All Soring Tactics Act attracting 300 House cosponsors – Blackburn introduced a sham reform bill as a strategy to sow confusion. The American Veterinary Medical Association described her bill as “nothing more than an attempt to maintain the status quo in an industry riddled with abuse and will ensure that the broken system of seeing horses sored at an alarming rate does not have to answer for its crimes.” The Tennessean’s editorial board said that “Blackburn’s legislation was the best that horse-abusers’ money could buy, in the form of tens of thousands of dollars in contributions to her campaign, in order to continue torturing and maiming horses.”
Even leaders in the Walking horse industry, including Bill Harlin, the proprietor of the famed Harlinsdale Farm in Franklin, voiced support to end soring and pass the PAST Act. Blackburn was unmoved.
Blackburn made a crusade of protecting the trainers who sored horses, but she seldom missed an opportunity to weigh in against other animal welfare reforms. Perhaps her most outrageous vote came against the Pet Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act, which set up national standards to require planning to help people and pets as natural disasters bore down on communities. The vote came just months after 1,200 residents in Louisiana and Mississippi perished to floods triggered by Hurricane Katrina; so many thousands of people stayed behind and faced the fury of the storm because they didn’t want to abandon their pets and didn’t have anywhere to go.
She was involved with a different kind of public safety threat when she voted against an amendment to stop the abuse of cows too sick or injured to walk – known as “downers.” The House defeated the amendment by the narrowest of margins, 199 to 202, and just months later, the USDA determined a cow slaughtered in Washington state had Mad Cow Disease. That cow was a “downer,” and if the ban on slaughtering “downers” had been in place, she would not have been dragged into the slaughterhouse. This was the first finding of a cow with this disease in the U.S., and in response, more than 80 nations closed their markets to U.S. beef imports, causing a loss to the cattle industry of more than $10 billion in lost exports.
Blackburn voted to oppose efforts to stop the slaughter of horses for human consumption, even though horses are given many drugs unfit for human consumption; she voted to block the Fish and Wildlife Service from cracking down on the ivory trade, even though criminal syndicates and terrorists cells financed their operations and their purchase of weapons by selling the tusks of elephants; and she voted against efforts to stop the trade in primates for the pet trade, even after the public learned of cases where powerful apes kept as pets disfigured their caretakers.
During consideration of the 2004 Agriculture spending bill, Blackburn voted against an amendment to provide funding for enforcement of the recently upgraded law against dogfighting and cockfighting in America. And last year, Marsha Blackburn even voted to roll back federal rules that had stopped the killing of wolves and bears in their dens; shooting grizzly bears by spotting them from airplanes, and even shooting swimming caribou – on national wildlife refuges and preserves.
It’s hard to believe someone could be so consistently callous and support practices that were so inimical to common sense and the public good.
When Bob Corker announced he would not run for re-election, Blackburn stepped in. The horse-soring crowded swooned. But she’s facing no pushover in the general election. Former two-term Governor Phil Bredeson has developed a reputation as a non-partisan problem solver in his eight years leading the state. He’s been a true statesman, and he’s been getting support from across the political spectrum and the business community, notably from Tennessee’s music industry, including mega-star Taylor Swift.
The choice for Tennessee voters is as clear as Blackburn’s record is unconscionable. Tennesseans should treat Blackburn’s consistent and overwhelming record on animal cruelty issues to be disqualifying. They can send an electoral verdict that cruelty is never acceptable.