It was the first time I was able to vote and I unfortunately fell for my dad's spiel of "You don't switch horses in the middle of the race." Race here meaning "war."
In the US, people don't eat horse meat, so old horses are made into dog food. There's a code for it in the ingredient list so the humans don't realize. Dogs don't care.
Horses moved from being a utility/livestock animal to a pet in the minds of most Westerners after automobiles replaced them for transportation and farmwork (counting tractors as automotives here). They're only even "pets" for upper-class folks most of the time, but business doesn't want to offend their sensibilities or some shit.
The same can be said of rabbits, people definitely don't eat as much rabbit anymore. It's just not a meat you buy at the grocery store, you have to hunt it. So now lots of non-rural places, at least in the States, they're seen as pets or pests. They can also carry a disease communicable to humans so with the overabundance of factory farming animals they aren't really desired as meat, most game meat isn't even eaten all that much outside rural areas anymore anyway.
Hell, most American people don't eat duck, let alone rabbit. If it's not beef, pork, chicken, or fish, most Americans consider it to be some "exotic" meat or have some taboo attached to it.
Horse meat became illegal for human consumption in the US because of the amount of people trying to slip old race horses in for slaughter as a way to recoup the loss of a racehorse being too old to continue racing and what not. which led to food full of steroids and all sorts of other shit that isn't allowed in animals raised for human consumption. They found it easier to just ban horse meat than they did to try and create oversight.
Horse is tasty. Kind of like Bison tho where if you cook it wrong eating a shoe would be less difficult. You gotta add fat and go with the adage of 'low and slow'. Good flavor though.
I'm an American, but I travel often. Went to Iceland and had grilled horse steaks. They needed more seasonings than beef steak as the meat is very lean. Tasted good nonetheless.
Last time in Japan I had horse sashimi, don't recommend that one, as the same lack-of-flavor issue applies. It was interesting to try anyways.
Also the antibiotics they give horses have some really nasty interactions with the human body and when combined with a lot of meds give you an autoimmune disorder. This can be fixed by cooking the everloving shit out of the meat which humans find, to put it simply, unappetizing. Dogs don't give a flying fuck if you overcooked your meat into the driest toughest shit imaginable so it goes to them because if you blended meat into a fine paste then formed tiny balls and cooked them off again you can't sell that shit to humans.
True. In reality though, some of the same antibiotics are given to animals humans do eat! Not everybody follow the rules, and the rules aren't all that great to start with.
I know, right? I can never find horse meat with the people food, but they're just gonna stick it in pet food like some common ground cartilage meal? Where the fuck is MY horsemeat?!
Philippines and France are two off the top of my head. It MAY be illegal in PH now, I'm not sure. But that didn't stop it from being served when I was there.
1.5k
u/gfh110 May 26 '23
It was the first time I was able to vote and I unfortunately fell for my dad's spiel of "You don't switch horses in the middle of the race." Race here meaning "war."