What’s The Beef Over Horse Meat?

Following reports that a Roswell meatpacker was seeking federal permission to slaughter horses and process horse meat, New Mexico’s governor, attorney general and land commissioner weighed in strongly against the idea and an equine protection group called it “a national disgrace.” This newspaper’s editorial board took its own umbrage last week, opining that “Americans don’t eat Trigger.”

Dare I add my own less outraged – and therefore less popular – thoughts to the issue?

Here goes: Meat’s meat.

That Americans canonize some flesh (“BEEF! It’s what’s for dinner”) but find eating horse meat gross or barbaric is one of those powerful but irrational cultural norms that allows us to be “us” and to differentiate ourselves from “them.”

We don’t eat horse meat because horses are beautiful and noble, and without them we would never have tamed the West or turned prairie into farm land. We don’t eat horse meat for the same reasons we don’t eat our dogs.

But as we love our horses and villainize those who would eat them, we also quietly ship our horses to slaughter to feed consumer markets elsewhere.

It’s not illegal to eat horse meat in the United States, and until five years ago it wasn’t illegal to slaughter a horse and, like other livestock, package and sell its meat. When Congress stopped funding USDA inspections of horse meat in 2006, the horse meat processing industry was effectively shut down.

Did that save a lot of horses from a meat hook?

Last year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report that outlined the state of equine slaughter: About 138,000 American horses (out of an estimated 9 million) were sent to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico in 2010. That’s about the same number as were slaughtered here before the ban on horse meat inspection shifted horse slaughter across our borders.

That tells us what we probably already had guessed – that the ban didn’t save horses from slaughter; it only moved it to other countries. By logical extension, allowing U.S. slaughter houses to kill horses again won’t result in any more being killed. It will only change the location of the deaths to USDA-regulated facilities, which we know would save horses an uncomfortable trip to Mexico and we hope would ensure a more humane end.

Lifting the ban and allowing a New Mexico businessman to get a piece of the industry wouldn’t mean Americans have to eat horse meat. And considering the gross-out factor in this country, it probably wouldn’t even be for sale here.

The simple fact is that horses that would be slaughtered in Roswell (and if not Roswell, somewhere else) will be packaged and shipped off to people in countries where people do eat Trigger – Italy, Canada, France, Japan, Sweden, Belgium.

Why am I finding it hard to jump on the outrage bandwagon at the prospect of someone applying for permission to conduct a business that has been perfectly legal in this country for as long as any of us has been alive?

My copy of the “Joy of Cooking” doesn’t have any recipes for cooking horse meat, but it does have recipes for squirrel and chicken and woodchuck and venison and beef and duck and opossum. To eat any one of them is just as baffling to me as eating another.

I haven’t eaten meat of any kind (or fish or fowl) for a couple of decades, and as a vegetarian, I don’t get the extra “ew” factor that would come with porcupine instead of pork on the plate. For you to eat it, somebody killed it.

What does it say about us that our morality is based on aesthetics and sentimentality? Do we kill and consume only the homely and spare the beautiful? Is it more barbaric to sacrifice an adorable or noble animal for your dinner table? If so, why do Americans eat rabbit and veal and lamb? Is killing a cow OK because we haven’t named it, saddled it up and taken it on a pack trip or bet on it at the racetrack or watched a movie about it?

The fact is that horses die, sometimes of old age and sometimes of illness or injury, and when they die, they are often eaten. People who love their horses and have the resources to hire a backhoe and the space on their property for a grave big enough to hold a car sometimes bury their horses. But most dead horses go to a rendering plant (at the horse owner’s expense), where they provide meat for zoo animals and become components of pet food and glue.

Allowing horse slaughter here provides a similar option for horses that are no longer wanted or whose owners no longer can take care of them. Stopping horse slaughter in this country doesn’t stop the suffering of horses, but it does give horse owners a better option than dropping them off on the mesa where they can starve to death.

That same GAO report that found no reduction in the slaughter of American horses for meat when the industry shifted to Mexico and Canada found the shift negatively affected prices paid for horses (by 8 to 21 percent). And it found a corresponding rise in investigations for horse neglect and more abandoned horses since the local option for horse slaughter was removed in 2007.

Winston Churchill said, “There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.”

I think there is something about the outside of the horse slaughter outrage that tells us a lot about the inside of a man, especially a sentimental one with a napkin in his lap and a steak on his plate.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal