Essay Says Abuse of Horses Is Common in Amish Life, Calls for Cruelty Laws Without Religious Exemptions

Animal cruelty involving Amish owners and the Amish horse trade drew public attention after an August 2, 2016, incident in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. According to an account by Tawn Crowther, a woman driving a rural road that day saw a horse harnessed to a large wooden cart stop, apparently overcome by heat and the load it was pulling. Crowther said the driver, a man dressed in the wide-brimmed hat and plain white shirt of the Amish, began beating the animal. She said she pulled over and called police.

Crowther said the officers who responded told her they were unsure of the outcome, and she reported that they said Amish are governed under a different law. The Ephrata Police Department later issued a statement denying that it had said the Amish are subject to a “different law.” It said the officer on the scene had said only that “how the law applied to the immediate situation was not immediately clear.” The horse was euthanized, though the local fire department had used about 1,000 gallons of water in an attempt to cool it.

The Ephrata police later charged Marvin M. Sensenig with two counts of animal cruelty. He pleaded guilty and paid $754 in fines. The case was reported in national newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Miami Herald, and in the international Daily Mail. The author of the source article argues that the penalty was light for the conduct described and that the case was not unique, but these are the author’s assessments rather than findings of the court.

The source article also notes that information about Amish communities is limited, since the Amish, an Anabaptist community of roughly 400,000 people who largely reject modern technology, generally avoid being photographed and rarely post material online. Within the available material, the author cites a 2018 article in the Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies, published by the University of Akron, which quotes an equestrian who said that Amish horse care varies widely, that some Amish treat their horses well, and that in his view the Amish do mistreat horses in some cases. The author also cites reports from rescue groups about individual horses, including one case from 2021 in which a rescue group found a wire wrapped around a horse’s foot.

The article’s central claim concerns horse slaughter. The last commercial horse slaughterhouse in the United States closed in 2007. The source explains that no federal ban exists; instead, an appropriations provision has barred the U.S. Department of Agriculture from spending money to inspect horse slaughterhouses. Horses can still be shipped to Mexico or Canada, where slaughter is legal. The source cites a 2023 study by three nonprofit groups, Animal Wellness Action, the Center for a Humane Economy and Animals’ Angels, which named the Amish and Mennonite communities as a major source of slaughter horses in the Midwest and East. The same study reported that annual U.S. horse slaughter has fallen from a high of nearly 350,000 in the 1990s to about 20,000.

The source describes conditions at the New Holland, Pennsylvania, horse auction. A 2010 account by nature writer Lisa Couturier described a mare leaving the ring and being whipped in the face by young men she identified as Mennonite. A nonprofit report on discarded buggy and work horses from Amish and Mennonite communities that were sold weekly at the New Holland auction stated that “Many of these horses are emaciated or limping,” and that others showed signs of strangles, a contagious respiratory infection, and overgrown or cracked hooves.

Source: Read the original report