“We’re Americans,” Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu told me two weeks ago in the Russell Senate building in Washington, D.C. “We don’t eat our dogs, and we don’t eat our horses.” She had just finished delivering a speech to a rapt audience of two-dozen bright-eyed teenage girls, a handful of congressmen, top members of the ASPCA and Humane Society, and Lorenzo Borghese, star of the ninth season of the reality television show The Bachelor. They had gathered for “Horses on the Hill,” an event organized by a coalition of animal rights groups and equine enthusiasts lobbying in support of the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act, which aims to ban the slaughtering of horses for human consumption.

Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say: restore a ban on slaughtering horses for human consumption. Among the lesser known achievements of the Obama administration was a decision last year to reinstate funding for the USDA inspection of horse slaughterhouses, effectively lifting a four and a half year ban on the practice. It was a move that quickly inspired opposition. In Washington, Senator Landrieu and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Representatives Dan Burton of Indiana and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois authored the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act; in New Mexico, Governor Susana Martinez has demanded the federal government intervene to prevent a slaughterhouse in her state from becoming the first in the nation to begin slaughtering horses.

The politicians claim to be acting in the interest of American horses, and the horse fans and reality TV stars at “Horses on the Hill” seemed to see it that way, too. But, however good their intentions, their efforts may have the unintended consequence of inflicting more harm against the very animals they’re trying to protect.

To understand why, it’s important to first point out that regardless of whether horses are slaughtered on U.S. territory, the United States does, in fact, have a horse meat industry. Around 130,000 horses (animals that the U.S. tax code classifies as livestock) are currently shipped each year, often in exceedingly poor conditions, from the United States to slaughterhouses in Mexico or Quebec. (The resulting meat is either sold to boucherie chevaline shops in Europe, or eaten domestically in Canada and Mexico.) By thus sparing them the cruelty of a journey abroad, the Obama administration’s decision to allow the horses to be slaughtered on American territory could be considered a humane agricultural reform.

The authors of the Horse Slaughter Prevention Act, however, are scandalized at the thought of acquiescing to any harm against horses. Horses are owed better treatment, Landrieu announced at “Horses on the Hill,” because “our nation was built on their backs”; reality star Lorenzo Borghese declared that horses deserve to treated as “majestic animals,” not common livestock. That’s why their bill proposes not only to make it illegal to slaughter horses for meat within U.S. borders, but banning the export of horses for the purpose of slaughtering elsewhere.