Horse slaughter & raw milk advocate Sue Wallis, 56

(Beth Clifton collage)

Sue Wallis, 56, was found dead early on January 28, 2014 in her room at the Tower West Lodge in Gillette, Wyoming, where she was to attend a legislators’ breakfast in the morning.

Elected to the Wyoming House of Representatives in November 2006, Wallis as a member of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party broke with the Republican mainstream in favoring abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and legalizing medical use of marijuana, but was promoting schemes to revive horse slaughter for human consumption and to legalize the sale of unpasteurized milk.

Wallis in December 2008 persuaded the National Council of State Legislatures to pass a pro-horse slaughter resolution, in 2010 won passage of a Wyoming state law which allows horse slaughter for sale at cost of state institutions and nonprofit agencies, in 2011 promoted a pro-slaughter “Summit of the Horse” in Las Vegas that attracted only a fraction as many participants as she had attended, in 2012 unsuccessfully sought investment capital to open a horse slaughterhouse near Riverton, Wyoming, and in 2013 promoted a similar scheme in Gallatin, Missouri. Wallis’ advocacy of raw milk was no more successful.

Beth & Merritt Clifton.
(Geoff Geiger photo)

Research published in the December 2013 edition of the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention journal Emerging Infectious Diseases confirmed an earlier study showing that consumers of raw milk are 150 times more likely that consumers to pasteurized milk to develop illnesses including the crippling Guillain-Barre syndrome, and found that about one raw milk consumer in six develops a related illness.