Chris Heyde

Early Friday morning, the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee passed a surface transportation reauthorization bill that includes a bipartisan ban on transporting horses for slaughter, according to Chris Heyde, who runs the governmental affairs firm Blue Marble Strategy, and who has long worked on the ban, and Patrick Cummings of the National Thoroughbred Alliance. The Van Drew-Titus amendment to the Build America 250 Act, HR 8870, shares the identical language of the Save America's Forgotten Equines Act--the SAFE Act, which has 229 cosponsors in the House. The bill would...

It is, of course, a good thing, that the subjects of aftercare and slaughter are being so widely debated, with influential owners like Mike Repole and Aron Wellman all but demanding that the industry come together and solve the problem. Just last week, Pat Cummings, who has been working side-by-side with Repole on the issue, penned a letter to the TDN in which he revealed what he called "20 concise findings, with a funding model projection" that he and Repole have put together. Good for Cummings. Good for Repole. Owner...

Horse racing can pat itself on its back for the progress that has been made concerning horses sent to slaughter. Under the Federal Meat Inspection Act, horses are an amenable species, which means that horse meat cannot be shipped or sold for human consumption without inspection. With the government declining to foot the bill for inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration, every slaughter facility in the U.S. was forced to close. Tremendous strides have also been made when it comes to aftercare. There are dozens of wonderful charities out...

Chris Heyde is the founder of Blue Marble Strategy and is a Washington D.C. lobbyist who has dedicated his career to animal welfare issues. Along the way, he has had some important successes, including effectively ending horse slaughter in the U.S. But one main goal remains and has been elusive. Heyde has been fighting for passage of the Save America's Forgotten Equines (SAFE) Act, which would prohibit the slaughter of horses in the U.S. as well as ban the shipping of them to slaughterhouses in the Mexico and Canada. Heyde...

Chris Heyde, an animal welfare lobbyist, joins this week's TDN Writers' Room to discuss the state of aftercare and what the industry can do to pass the SAFE Act, which which would place a ban on the slaughter trade within the United States.

As I begin my tenure as chair of The Jockey Club, I look to the future with optimism and gratitude for the work already done by so many in our sport. Together, we have elevated safety, strengthened aftercare, and built partnerships that once seemed unlikely. Now, we have the opportunity to take the next step: ending horse slaughter, so that the pipeline that undermines public trust and jeopardizes our horses is finally closed. Long before this conversation reached industry headlines, The Jockey Club was working with animal-welfare experts to raise...

I was pleased to see the increased dialogue regarding Thoroughbred aftercare and the additional steps needed to reduce the number of horses needing homes in two recent TDN articles, "Open Letter to the Industry: When Does a Thoroughbred Earn a Safe Retirement?" and "Aftercare Not Meeting the Need." Unfortunately, they are two ships passing in the night when all horse industry boats should be rowing in the same direction.  Regardless of the front-end attention from owners and industry, Thoroughbreds will always fall prey to abuse until the export of horses...

It's one sentence among tens of thousands encompassing 900 pages, but when it comes to the future of and welfare of the nation's wild horses and burros, it is frightening and to be taken seriously. "Congress must enact laws permitting the BLM to dispose humanely of these animals." The "BLM" is the Bureau of Land Management and "these animals" are the estimated 73,000 wild horses and burros under BLM control. The sentence appears in Project 2025. According to its website, "Project 2025 is a historic movement, brought together by over...

In 2009 when Tom Rooney joined the U.S. House of Representatives for Florida's 17th Congressional District--a Southwest portion of the Sunshine State--he assumed passage of a bill to permanently ban the commercial slaughter of horses, along with their export for such purposes, was a slam dunk. "I did not think that this was going to be a controversial issue," said Rooney, now the president and CEO of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association (NTRA). "It immediately became one of the most contentious, where I was like, 'yeah, I oppose horse slaughter...

For close to 20 years, activists have been working to protect American horses by lobbying for a federal ban on horse slaughter, rallying each year to keep the inspection of horse slaughter plants defunded and continuously working to pass the Save America's Forgotten Equine (SAFE) Act. The next 30 days are important in the push for a federal ban on horse slaughter. Every one in the racing business can have a hand in helping to pass a ban. In March 2021, the TDN interviewed veteran animal welfare lobbyist Chris Heyde,...

   Chris Heyde is the founder of Blue Marble Strategy, LLC, a government affairs firm in Washington, D.C., which is the country's leading animal protection lobbyist. Heyde has been working towards passing a ban on horse slaughter in the United States for almost 20 years, serving as head of government and legal affairs for 17 years for the Animal Welfare Institute, the nation's oldest federal animal protection legislation program. Before entering the animal protection field, Chris was vice president of a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm that represented clients from health...