By Christine KreylingPublished on March 24, 2010 at 2:04pm

Equine abuse has been in the news ever since November’s appalling discovery of 84 starving horses on a Cannon County farm. The attempt by state Rep. Janis Sontany and state Sen. Bill Ketron to ramp up the legal punishment for such aggravated abuse  and the ardent opposition by the Tennessee Farm Bureau  has also received plenty of media play (see “All the Starving Horses,” March 11). But State Rep. Frank Niceley has a radically different  and heretofore unpublicized  proposal that he says will curb the abuse.

Niceley wants to legalize horse slaughter.

Niceley and state Sen. Mike Faulk have a bill in the Tennessee legislature that would enable “the humane handling and slaughter of surplus domestic horses” (HB 1428/SB 1898). Prime co-sponsors include a hefty number of the members of the House Agriculture Committee through which the bill must pass.

The reason the slaughter bill has so far not registered on the radar screen is because Niceley filed it as what’s called a “caption” bill, a bill whose stated purpose has little-to-no-relationship to its ultimate legislative intent. The real import behind a caption bill is revealed by subsequent amendments to the original. This legislative hocus-pocus is permitted as long as the amendments alter the same sections of the Tennessee legal code as the original bill. Legislators often employ the tactic to conceal the content of controversial legislation until it can be rammed through with a minimum of unwelcome publicity.

Thus when Niceley filed HB 1428 last year, the summary of the bill directed the commissioner of agriculture to “ensure that the statistics and other information” produced by the Tennessee Department of Agriculture “are posted and kept current on the department’s web site” — innocuous stuff. Niceley and Faulk eventually deferred this bill to the 2010 legislative session.

The amendments to HB 1428 that recently emerged, however, delete all references to statistics and websites. The amendments declare the intent “to encourage the location of equine slaughter and processing facilities in Tennessee and provide for the operation of such facilities in a sanitary, safe, and humane manner, with such facilities to be licensed, permitted, inspected, and regulated by the department of agriculture.” This is legislative whiplash territory.

Niceley says that last week he deferred the slaughter bill’s hearing before the House Budget Subcommittee until April 7 because “it’s easier to get things passed” toward the end of a session, “when things get busy.” One of his senatorial colleagues, who refuses to speak on the record because “I have to work with this guy,” detects another motive.

“Frank doesn’t want it to come up until the filing date

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