It’s August 2, 2016—a hot summer day in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, home to the Amish religious community. A woman named Tawn Crowther is driving along a narrow rural road when suddenly, she sees something horrifying up ahead. A horse, harnessed to a large wooden cart, has stopped in its tracks, seemingly overcome by the heat and the heavy load it has to pull. But rather than help the distressed animal, its driver—a man dressed in the classic wide-brimmed hat and plain white shirt of the Amish—has started brutally beating it.

Photo courtesy Tawn Crowther

As Crowther described the incident: 

[The] horse was unable to pull a wagon full of watermelon and 2 grown men [...] At that point he continued to kick, hit and pull on the poor seemingly dying animal. I pulled over and called the police. They came to evaluate the situation, only to tell me that they are unsure of the outcome. Because Amish are governed under a different law. Are you kidding? Isn’t abuse standard across the board? So if I decide to beat and kill animals I need to change my religion to be above the law?

In the end, the horse was euthanized, despite the local fire department having used around 1,000 gallons of water to try to cool down the overheated animal. In a subsequent statement, the Ephrata Police Department denied saying that the Amish are subject to a “different law” and claimed that the officer on the scene had said only that “how the law applied to the immediate situation was not immediately clear.” But it’s not really plausible that it would be “unclear” what laws applied. All 50 states have their own laws against cruelty to animals, and in each, the concept is “standard across the board,” just as Crowther said. You couldn’t ask for a more clear-cut case than someone beating an overworked horse to death. 

In any case, the Ephrata police eventually charged Marvin M. Sensenig, the man beating the horse, with two counts of animal cruelty. He pleaded guilty and paid $754 in fines, a remarkably light penalty compared to the violence he’d just inflicted on the animal. The case attracted widespread attention, appearing in national papers like the Washington Post and Miami Herald and even international ones like the Daily Mail. It was unusual for two reasons: because it was so blatant, taking place in broad daylight on a public road, and because the perpetrator was a member of a unique and insular religious sect. Sensenig is an extreme example, for sure. But his case is far from unique. In fact, abuse and cruelty to animals are disturbingly common features of Amish life. It’s a problem that badly needs to be addressed. But nobody seems to have the political will to face it head-on. 

In the first place, it should be made clear that any analysis of the Amish and their culture is made more difficult by the relative lack of information coming out of Lancaster County and other Amish enclaves in the United States and Canada. We are talking about an Anabaptist community of roughly 400,000 people that rejects most modern technology: they still rely on horse-drawn carriages for transport and farming alike and live by choice in a state of separation from the modern world. In most cases, the Amish will not pose for film or photography, as they believe it to be a violation of the biblical commandment against “graven images,” and they generally aren’t putting much of anything on the internet (although some communities have allowed themselves to be photographed by people they trust). For sociologists and political writers alike, that makes things tricky. In the resources we do have, however, the abuse of animals—and of horses in particular—is a recurring theme. 

For instance, a 2018 article in the Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies, published by the University of Akron, contains the following testimony from an “accomplished equestrian” with knowledge of the community: 

The Amish also are their own blacksmiths, or farriers, trimming and shoeing their own horses [because] it is cheaper for them. They don't measure to make sure all four feet are even and they have little to no training other than what is passed down from father to son. The variation, therefore, is enormous. Some Amish love flashy horses and treat them well. I don't mean to denigrate everyone. Like all communities, individual members differ. Overall, however, my experience and what I've heard from family (who know or knew horses) and from other horse-y types is that the Amish do mistreat and abuse their animals, horses included, if not also particularly their buggy horses. 

This fits with the accounts of people who work at animal shelters and rescue projects and have documented many cases of individual horses who’ve suffered terrible mistreatment at Amish hands. There’s Ezekiel (or “Zeke”), who rescuers with the Baby Girl Horse Rescue and Veteran Therapy Ranch of Fellesmere, Florida, discovered in 2021 with a “strip of wire intentionally wrapped around his front left foot that was slowly growing into the bone.” There’s Katie, who, according to workers at the Equus Rescue of Illinois, was so traumatized by past whippings that she shied away at the sound of a snapping carrot. There’s Barnaby, a wild horse from Oregon who was “rounded up, adopted, and worked nearly to death” by Amish farmers, then “discarded in a killpen for the last bit of money that could be wrung out of his suffering” once he could no longer work. (Notably, the staff at the Sky Dog Ranch and Sanctuary write that this is something that “happens often with Amish work horses.”) One of the most horrific examples comes from the Little Brook Farm sanctuary in Old Chatham, New York: 

John Henry was an Amish plow horse, overworked and underfed. Brothers shared him, so when one finished their fields, he was given to the next one...and then the next one...and the next - for over 15 years. Water was kept in a common trough in the aisle and horses were led to it at some point during the day. John Henry drinks a LOT of water so preventing access to it was not only inhumane but contributed to his poor body condition. His tail is docked so there's no protection from biting flies. (In a harness, they're unable to even reach their head around to remove a horse fly.)

Speaking from personal experience, I grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania and heard stories like this on a fairly regular basis from a woman who ran a small animal rescue with her husband: horses with prominent whip scars, visible ribs, and so on, all saved at auction from Amish farms and given a quiet place to live out their remaining days. 

Some of these abuse cases, like Ezekiel’s, could be considered aberrations—the work of a “few bad apples,” as the phrase goes. But others, like Barnaby’s, speak to a more systemic kind of animal exploitation: the practice of using a horse for hard labor for as long as possible, then selling it off for slaughter when it physically can’t work anymore. While a horse could simply be retired from its duties and “put out to pasture,” the Amish approach is more harsh, as another horse rescuer puts it: 

What we know is that a lot of times [the] Amish—not all the time, but sometimes, a lot of times, oftentimes—really just view their horses as tractors. Right? So they’re meant for a specific job, they would use that horse for years and years and years for that job, and when they can no longer perform anymore, there’s no purpose for them, or reason for them to keep them any more. 

By now, you’ve probably noticed the references to “the killpen” and “slaughter”—that is, the killing of horses for meat. Hang on, you may ask, hasn’t slaughtering horses been banned for a while? It’s a fair question, as it certainly seems like the kind of practice that should have ended decades ago. But unfortunately the answer is “yes and no.” The last commercial horse slaughterhouse in the United States, run by the Belgian company Cavel International, did indeed close in 2007 as a result of U.S. government policy. But this wasn’t an outright ban on horse slaughter itself. Legislation like the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act (2011) or the Save America’s Forgotten Equines (SAFE) Act (2023), both of which would have created a federal ban, has yet to pass both houses of Congress. Instead, what we have is a de facto ban by a roundabout way. Since 2007, language in an appropriations bill dictates that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is prohibited from spending any federal money on inspecting horse slaughterhouses. No USDA inspections, no slaughter. But what that doesn’t do is prevent people from shipping horses to either Mexico or Canada, where slaughtering them is still perfectly legal. So when elderly Amish horses go to livestock auctions like the ones in New Holland, Pennsylvania, or Sugar Creek, Ohio, they have one of two likely fates: they’ll either be bought by a rescuer or sanctuary worker, or by someone trying to snap them up cheaply, ship them across the border, and turn them into horsemeat. 

In fact, a 2023 study by three nonprofit groups—Animal Wellness Action, the Center for a Humane Economy, and Animals’ Angels—found that the Amish are one of the key groups keeping the horse-slaughter industry alive in North America. It’s declined as a whole, from a high point of “nearly 350,000” horses killed annually in the 1990s to just 20,000 today, as both “supply and demand have cratered.” But on the “supply” side, there are still four key “horse sources” remaining. One is the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which has a program incentivizing people to adopt wild horses and burros but also “adopts horses to individuals known to sell animals directly to slaughter.” Two other key sources are the “harness racing industry in the eastern United States” and a small group of Native American tribes. But the fourth is “the Amish and Mennonite [communities], who are a major source of slaughter horses in the Midwest and East.” So not only are the Amish incidentally cruel to their horses on a day-to-day basis, whipping them too much or shoeing them improperly, but they’re helping to maintain an entire industry built on killing them.

That’s the big picture, but it’s worth pausing for a second to consider—repulsive as it is—what the process of auctioning and slaughtering horses actually looks like. Unsurprisingly, it is neither clean nor painless. In 2010, nature writer Lisa Couturier attended the New Holland horse auction and was appalled by what she found: 

Standardbred mare, leaves the ring early. On her way out, Mennonite boys whip her repeatedly in the face. Russek will tell me later that some of the Amish and Mennonites can be “truly heartless” in the way they treat their horses, an observation that is, in all but the same words, repeated by a horse rescue worker who reported her experience at an Indiana auction on the Grateful Acres website: “The kill pen is full of Belgian draft horses, the powerful, living machinery of Amish farms. . . . [T]he Belgians in this pen are grievously and horrifyingly injured. They have been worked until they literally cannot stand any longer. . . . No matter that the animal has slaved . . . for any number of years, no matter that his swollen, oozing knee is collapsing at every forced step. Just as a broken plow would be sold to the junk man for the metal, these broken animals are sold to the kill-man for meat.

In its descriptions of the “discarded buggy and work horses from the surrounding Amish and Mennonite communities that are being sold every week” at the New Holland auction, the nonprofit report also observes that “Many of these horses are emaciated or limping. Others show signs of Strangles, a highly contagious respiratory infection,” and “Draft horses are often brought in with horrific overgrown, cracked or curled up hooves.” The photos are worse, and we’ll do you a favor by not reproducing them here.  

Unfortunately, it’s not just horses. The Amish community has also become notorious for its role in operating puppy mills—highly unethical farming operations where dogs are made to reproduce as much as possible. It’s literally the mass production of puppies for sale. This fact came unexpectedly into the national news in 2023, when investigators looking into former Representative George Santos found that he’d written several bad checks to Amish dog breeders in 2017, helpfully writing “PUPPIES” in the subject line. Like most stories involving Santos, that’s fairly amusing, but the puppy mills themselves are not. According to the Main Line Times and Suburban newspaper of Eastern Pennsylvania, they originated in the 1970s, when commercial pet sellers “began to come from the Midwest to Pennsylvania” and “taught Amish and Mennonite farmers and others that a cash crop to supplement their incomes could be pets raised in their barns.” In the same article, American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) investigator Bob Baker observes that “The ironic thing is the Amish and Mennonites raise their (other) animals in better conditions” and “they treat dogs worse than livestock.” 

If anything, that’s an understatement. In March 2009, reporters with ABC News interviewed Bill Smith, the founder of the Main Line Animal Rescue of Chester County, Pennsylvania, about his experiences with Amish puppy mills. The picture he painted was a grim one, in which dogs lived their whole lives in close confinement and were subject to outright torture: 

When they come out of the rabbit hutches they walk like crabs because they don't know what it's like to walk on a proper surface. [...] The farmers, the Amish and the Mennonites, they pull the heads back and then they hammer sharp instruments down their throats to scar their vocal cords so they can't bark. [...] So that way they can have 500-600 dogs in a barn and no one knows. As we said, it's an industry of secrecy. 

At the time, ABC estimated there were about 300 licensed dog breeders in Lancaster County alone, with another 600 unlicensed ones “in barns and sheds.” Notably, this was a few months after Governor Ed Rendell had signed Pennsylvania’s Act 119, better known simply as the “Dog Law,” in October 2008. Rendell said he wanted to end Pennsylvania’s reputation as “the puppy mill of the east,” and Act 119 made some important provisions toward that goal, including mandates for trained veterinarians to examine each dog at a kennel and a ban on forcing dogs to live on painful wire flooring. But by 2012, the Philadelphia Inquirer found there was “little evidence” the law was actually being enforced. It also had a critical weakness, as its regulations only applied to kennels and breeders that sold 60 dogs or more per year. In 2015, PennLive journalist Colin Deppen wrote that the “trade long dominated by the Amish” was “not gone, just underground,” with many “small-time operators that regularly abuse and kill animals” popping up across Lancaster County. In 2018, former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Amy Worden wrote for Humane PA that: 

[P]uppy mills did not disappear from the Pennsylvania landscape. While the numbers of commercial kennels plummeted from 300 to about 30 following the passage of the bill, that number has crept back up to almost 90. Many kennels dropped below the 60 dog-sale-or-transfer threshold to skirt the new law.

Elsewhere, we can find accounts of equally abhorrent practices. In Laurelville, Ohio, an Amish dog breeder named Jonas Beachy faced 23 separate animal cruelty charges in 2013 after the local police got wind of his backyard operation, where 52 dogs were living under “horrendous conditions” such as “severely matted” fur and “some injured animals [...] living in feces a foot deep.” But Beachy got a lawyer, who loudly condemned the charges as a “crusade against Amish breeders” by the Ohio SPCA (implying religious bias against his client), and was eventually able to get the charges dropped on a record-keeping technicality. More recently, the Paws Angels Dog Rescue of Antioch, Tennessee, has been working to save as many dogs as possible from Amish puppy mills across Ohio, Kentucky, and Mississippi, and its workers describe horribly cramped conditions in which the animals “live in rabbit hutches in the backyard” or in “warehouse barns” rather than suitable homes. And at the nonprofit East Coast Corgi Rescue, the workers write that “most of our highly aggressive corgis, [or] those that are paralyzed from Degenerative Myelopathy, [or] those with the blood borne disorder Von Willebrands” come from Amish mills. Beyond the disturbing details of the cruelty itself, it’s important to remember that this is all taking place at a time when the United States has an overabundance of shelter dogs, many of whom can’t find homes and are eventually euthanized (359,000 last year to be exact)—so the existence of for-profit puppy mills that churn out more dogs is doubly inexcusable. And yet, the Amish breeders show no sign of changing any time soon. 

On the face of it, it seems bizarre and hypocritical that a religious order so concerned with piety and humility could at the same time be responsible for inflicting so much suffering. How, we might ask, is it possible that the Amish have a spiritual objection to seemingly mundane acts like having their pictures taken or wearing anything but the plainest of clothing but see nothing wrong with the torment and slaughter of animals under their care? What moral sense does that make? Well, in the first place we should remember that no religion is a monolith, and there most likely are those in the Amish community who object strongly to institutions like horse auctions for slaughter and cramped, unsanitary puppy mills. Leaving aside the possibility of divergent voices, though, Amish animal abuse makes a certain kind of sense—at least when viewed in the context of the Amish worldview as a whole and that of conservative Christianity more generally. 

The critical point, as Princeton researcher Nicole Welk-Joerger wrote in a 2021 study of “Amish Agrarianism,” is that “Amish views of the environment are [...] ultimately anchored in the understanding that God made nature for human use.” In other words, where modern conceptions of animal rights start with the understanding that animals are similar to humans in many ways—capable of fear and pain, possessing unique personalities that should be valued—and that both humans and animals are part of the same natural world, the Amish do not share these core assumptions. Rather, they literally believe what Welk-Joerger said: that God created humans distinct from the rest of nature and placed animals in the world to be humanity’s tools and resources. There are several passages from the Christian Bible that could be used to justify such a view, but the most obvious is Genesis 1:28, in which God orders humanity to “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” (That might be the most troublesome single verse in the book, as it also contains the command to “be fruitful and multiply,” which has been the basis for a lot of anti-contraception politics over the years.) In any case, if you believe that animals are fundamentally something rather than someone, then the very concepts of “animal abuse” or the violation of “animal rights” wouldn’t apply to you in the same way as to everyone else. Instead, an action like sending an elderly horse to the slaughterhouse might seem morally equivalent to selling off an old, dented plow for scrap metal. At the end of the day, both are your belongings, things to be disposed of in any way you see fit.

Politically, this creates a familiar tension: a religious group has a concept of rights and morality regarding animals that leaves a wide opening for abuse, and members of the group wish to continue animal-harming practices that many view as abhorrent. If the practices are allowed to continue, arguably religious liberty has been protected, but at the expense of animals’ suffering and death. If authorities force the practices to be halted, the reverse is arguably true. For a less familiar example, we can look to Nepal, where animal advocates are currently trying to stop the Gadhimai slaughter ceremony. Described by its critics as “an appalling bloodbath,” this is a ritual sacrifice held every five years in honor of the Hindu goddess Gadhimai, who is believed to reward her devotees with “wishes or good fortune” for killing an animal in her name. This year, “At least 4,200 buffaloes and thousands of goats and pigeons” were reportedly killed in a single event in Bariyarpur. Undoubtedly, this is a custom of genuine spiritual significance to many Nepalese people, one that’s been going on for more than 200 years. And yet, it’s also a colossal outpouring of animal pain and bloodshed. How to weigh those conflicting factors? Well, the Nepalese government has come down on the side of an animal’s right to live being more important than a human’s right to preserve a ritual. They’ve listened to animal rights advocates and are working to slowly phase out the Gadhimai sacrifices, which are already smaller than they used to be. The activists complain they aren’t doing it quickly enough, but the basic principle that the state should intervene to stop animal cruelty even when it has a religious basis has been established. 

Illustration by Kasia Kozakiewicz

That principle is what the United States needs, too. Last year, Nathan J. Robinson wrote persuasively that “There Should Not Be ‘Religious Exemptions’ To Laws,” as democracy and the rule of law themselves are made meaningless if people can opt out of particular laws depending on what they personally believe. Now, the Amish have not been given a religious exemption from animal cruelty laws, as evidenced by the fact that people like Marvin Sensenig do occasionally face charges. But they do enjoy exemptions or carveouts from a surprising number of other U.S. laws. They aren’t required to send their children to public high schools, for instance, and instead use their own “one-room schoolhouses” that teach only up to the eighth grade. In New York state, for example, their horse-drawn buggies don’t have to be licensed or insured before they’re driven on public roads, and there are no seatbelt requirements, either—a fact which has led to all kinds of terrible accidents. In matters of criminal wrongdoing, the Amish community is “largely left to police itself.” Cases are typically solved through internal religious processes like appealing to the judgement of a minister rather than involving the secular courts, and there is “no set of punishments attached to a given transgression.” (The exceptions come when a non-Amish witness calls in the secular authorities, as Tawn Crowther did.) In one light, this kind of autonomous self-governance could be seen as inspiring; certainly it shows the falsehood of the idea that a society needs platoons of armed cops to survive. But when it comes to animals, it seems obvious that having their treatment overseen by people who essentially don’t believe they have any rights is going to lead to bad outcomes. 

That state of affairs can’t be allowed to go on. People in the United States need to do what their counterparts in Nepal have already done and say enough. There must be no more puppy mills and no more horse slaughter, regardless of what anyone believes or disbelieves about it. The process of rooting out these abuses will be hard, but there’s a clear roadmap, and it begins with the activists. Right now, a search of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) website reveals almost nothing about Amish or Mennonite animal abuse. For the single largest animal-rights organization in the world, that’s a shocking oversight. Groups like PETA have a responsibility to be on top of issues like this one and to put pressure on their elected officials to actually get something done. In turn, the government has a dual responsibility: to strengthen its laws against animal cruelty and to actually enforce them within Amish and other enclaves the same as it would outside. The United States needs an outright ban on transporting horses for slaughter so that that repulsive industry can finally pass into the history books where it belongs. State governments like Pennsylvania’s need to seal the loopholes in their dog abuse laws so that breeders can’t get away with using tiny wire cages so long as their puppy mill sells less than 60 dogs a year. There needs to be a wave of unannounced inspections across Lancaster County and places like it, and any animal facility found to be perpetrating abuse and cruelty needs to be swiftly shut down. 

It’s not that we in the non-Amish world, with our Christmas roasts and our patent leather shoes, are so much better. The same bedrock assumption that the Amish and other religious communities hold—that animals exist mainly for human use—drives plenty of exploitation and abuse in the secular world, too. It all has to be stopped. The question is, who has the political will to do it? In the case of the Amish, if any politician made a serious attempt to enforce animal welfare laws, there’d likely be a backlash from conservatives, who would paint it as an assault on religious faith; this already happens whenever someone tries to regulate Amish farmers’ hideously dangerous practice of selling raw milk. With other, more corporate horrors like factory farming, there are powerful meat industry lobbies who do their best to block any reform. Left to their own devices, politicians are unlikely to challenge an abusive status quo. So it’s up to the rest of us to force their hand—to build a political movement that demands an end to the needless suffering of animals, in whatever form it takes, and that demands the same standards of animal welfare be enforced everywhere, with no exceptions for anyone. If there’s going to be real change, many more people need to become activists for animal rights. They have to be well-organized and dedicated enough to be a constant thorn in the side of elected officials until they have no choice but to take action. Only then can the horror of animal abuse, Amish and otherwise, be ended for good.