Dear Congressman Sweeney...

You are a kind of hero right now because of your successful bill to ban horse slaughter. As an animal rights activist (how peculiar that we have to exist at all), I am supposed to be thanking you. But I am here to say I am appalled by your values.

You talked eloquently about the terrible abuses suffered by horses as they are crowded into trucks, where they often end up bloodied and injured. But then you lost me. You said that the slaughter of horses is different from the slaughter of cattle and chickens because horses such as Mr. Ed, Secretariat and Silver are "American icons."

So let me get this straight: Chickens and ducks and cows and pigs and sheep can endure the most horrific types of abuse their entire lives, and that is okay because we have not exploited any of them on stupid television shows or made millions of dollars off of them by having them race. They can be crowded into tiny spaces in which they cannot ever turn around, live in their own feces, have their beaks cut off, be thrown into a trash pile when their legs are broken, have their legs broken off by slaughter house employees, get thrown against the wall and smashed so employees can "let off steam," have tubes jammed down their throats every day, be packed so tightly in trucks that they cannot breathe, and be injected with so many hormones that they have multiple infections.

There is nothing more disgustingly immoral than factory farming, but you have endorsed it because the poor animals are not "icons."

Sorry, Congressman--you're not my hero.