Having been subsidized by government for years, the owners of Oahu’s only slaughterhouse would sell it to the state under terms of a bill receiving state legislative support. Such a purchase would be a drastic wrong move that could pit state government in competition with beef or pork slaughtered at facilities on neighbor islands.

A state takeover of Oahu’s only federally certified slaughterhouse would result in awkward competition with privately owned slaughterhouses on Maui, Kauai and the Big Island. That may be the reason that there probably is no other slaughterhouse in the nation owned by a state government.

Hawaii Livestock Cooperative has been beleaguered by financial difficulty since it bought the slaughterhouse from Palama Meat Co. in 2004, when it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Its mortgage for $1.4 million was facing probable foreclosure until the U.S. Department of Agriculture paid it off, and now the federal government wants the money back. The state granted the cooperative $600,000 two years ago.

Now, the bill proposes to spend $1.6 million in taxpayer funds to buy the slaughterhouse. This idea would have been tenuous at best in fiscally flush years — it’s a taxpayer bailout of a potential money pit — but it is especially dubious against the social services needs under financial jeopardy.

One of the arguments in support of the slaughterhouse purchase is that closing shop now would result in a cost of $8 million later to replace the plant at Campbell Industrial Park, should that need reemerge. More realistically, though, no company or group is likely to even consider embarking on such a risky venture.

Since the loss of milk production on Oahu, selection of cattle on the island for slaughter has dropped significantly. Of the more than 15,000 pigs slaughtered in the state, two-thirds are imported live from the mainland, according to a state Agriculture Department report to the 2008 Legislature.

One concern about shuttering the Oahu slaughterhouse is a decline in the availability of fresh — "hot" — pork, now delivered to markets early in the morning from pigs slaughtered the previous night at Campbell Park. However, that should not preclude the marketing in Honolulu of hot pork flown from the slaughterhouses on Maui, Kauai or the Big Island. The presence of those neighbor island slaughterhouses also helps allay fears about dire risks to Hawaii’s food security.

Animal rights activists campaigned four years ago against pigs being kept in cramped, filthy containers for four- or five-day voyages from the mainland. They pointed to public records during a one-year period showing that 1.4 percent died during the trip, about seven times the death rate of pigs that typically die during transport from one mainland point to another.

The Humane Society and the World Society for the Protection of Animals testified against the state buying the slaughterhouse, but that may not end the pig voyages. In the absence of a slaughterhouse on Oahu, the distribution launching pad of hot pork may switch to neighbor islands, where slaughterhouses would compete for the Oahu demand in the market-driven, American way.