I know there are people, even whole nations, who like it. It's relatively lean because the fat is layered between the muscles, not marbled through it. (I did an autopsy of a horse as part of a course in anatomy and physiology of the horse with Dr Deb Bennet, an American who is the world's top equine paleontologist. The horse was euthanased by tranquiliser and anaesthetic to prevent a prolonged and suffering death due to laminitis.)
I'm against eating horsemeat because of what happens during the transport, the holding period and the actual slaughter. There are laws to protect the animals' welfare - but the surveillance is random and woefully insufficient. I won't go into all the gruesome details of the illegalities, cruelties and accidents caused by negligence that frequently occur. I do know that what has appeared recently in a documentary produced by animal rights activists is not a freak occurrence. I've known about the level of atrocities for over 30 years. Most professionally experienced horse people are well aware of it. The more callous even make jokes about it; if a horse misbehaves, some cowboy types are apt to say, "he's off to the doggers on Monday" - but it's only half a joke, because it's what they actually do to animals they themselves have ruined with bad training.
According to Andrew McLean, the world's top horse and zoological psychologist, in Germany, 80% of the animals who go to abattoirs are there due to incompetent training that has created dangerous vices. Other western countries are not far behind. It has been the ugly secret of the horse industries ever since industrial-scale abattoirs were invented - and worse often happened before then.
But I will say what always happens with every slaughter at an abattoir - what is normal and routine. The individual animal is run up a chute into the slaughter room. When there, the horse can smell the adrenaline of the horses just killed and can smell death. Their noses are 500 times more sensitive than ours. He or she has a full view of all the dead carcasses in the abattoir, hung up on hooks, moving on a conveyor suspended from a steel-grid well above the heads of workers. At various stations, the carcasses are being skinned and eviscerated before they reach the area for refrigeration prior to butchering. Horse are social animals who instinctively care a great deal about each other's fates. They form strong bonds with any horse that has been their companion, even for as little as half an hour. They experience grief. Any person who has ever heard a horse whinnying relentlessly after the loss of a companion knows this. There is no question from the horses' behaviour when they see this sight, and the adrenaline in their blood after slaughter, that they feel tremendous fear in the moments before their death. Even when the abattoir work gets the slaughter technique right, and kills instantly, it is still, in my view, abominably cruel to subject the horse to this kind of fear.
Eating horse meat only encourages this cruelty - makes it profitable.
This post was edited by inky at November 17, 2019 6:47 AM MST
Funny you should ask. As an adult one of my parents told a bunch of his friends in my presence that he used to buy horse meat all the time when I was a child because it was so cheap. He thought it was really funny. I still get a little sick, queasy feeling when I remember hearing that. I would never knowingly eat horse meat.
Element 99 