Horse Flesh

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald lamenting the "gruesome trade in horse-flesh"
got me a bit stabby this morning.

I can see how the average punter (both of the restaurant and racetrack variety) could get upset about the practice, really I can. It's probably for the same reason pet owners get squeamish over the eating of dog meat in some parts of the world - the "cute and cuddly factor" has drawn fairly clear boundaries for most of us who have a choice in what goes on our plates.

But is eating horse flesh really any different to eating the flesh of any other four-legged beast?

Seeing as I brought dog meat up as a comparative example, I should probably explain that I object to the practice from an ethical point of view. The excessive cruelty involved in the production goes against my principles of free-range eating, for a start. Yep, I am a meat eater, and yep, many animals have died for my dinners - but the reports of hanging and pre-death electrocution to increase the adrenaline produced by the dogs before they are killed don't really fit in with my idea of keeping slaughter as clean as possible. (Wikipedia says that these practices are being cut down in Korea in favour of mass-electrocution to keep costs down, however, owing to the fact that dog meat is not legislated for human consumption, the industry is completely unregulated).

In contrast, from the article, it appears that horses in Australia are processed in the same way as the rest of our meat. Laura Stoikos, from a sanctuary called Cedar Springs Horses, is quoted as saying: "They are trucked in like cattle in the dead of night, they can smell the blood and they are killed one after another and they can see the horse in front of them killed so they know what is going on." But this is exactly the same thing that happens when your average cow or sheep or pig turns up at the abattoir, how does the fact that the animal being killed is a (perceptably failed) racehorse make a difference to proceedings?

I've known a few "horsey" people in my time, and their dedication to all things equine usually rivals the sport-lust of your most hardened footy fan or V8 SuperCar bogan. I understand why they'd be upset of the slaughter and consumption of their four-legged friends. I also find horse-racing appalling, in all its guises, so the idea that the industry is profiteering off their track off-cuts gets my hackles up. I actually laughed whilst reading the quote from anti-meat advocate Bo Derek in the linked article, suggesting that sporting horses are no longer "beasts of burden" - you only have to look at the injury stats for ex-racehorses and the relatively few years they spend on the track to realise that the only ones getting "sport" out of racing are humans. Owners have been sending old nags to the knackers since the beginning of time. But to suggest that humans eating horse meat is any worse than chowing down on Daisy the De-Milked Dairy Cow, or Mary the Mangey Mutton ... I don't know.

Horse meat has been eaten since pre-Christian times. My relatives ate it in wartime Germany. After a two day ride in the hot rural climes of Katherine in the Northern Territory on an ex bush racehorse, and being bucked off a cranky school horse startled by a motorbike in the pineforests near Joondalup in Western Australia, I don't have a lot of love for the bastard creatures. Having said that, I will admit to pulling a slightly squeamish-ed face when I came across it on a menu at the Tsukiji Fish Markets.


Would you eat horse-flesh, if you knew it had been processed in the same way that "regular" meats like beef and lamb are processed? Or would the cartoon neighs of Flicka and Black Beauty get the better of you?