Beating a delicious horse

[urbpan]

I know I've brought up this subject many times before, but it has come to my attention (to my email box, in fact) that Time Magazine has now written an article on it. I was considering, earlier today, to bring up the general subject of the human uses of animals, but I'll table that for a little later.

In short, why are horses on the short list of domestic animals that Americans don't eat? (And in fact there are laws against eating horses in some states.) The last paragraph of the article sums it up pretty neatly:

It's not that I don't think killing horses is cruel. It's just that I think killing chickens, pigs, sheep and cows is equally bad. Morality based on aesthetics is pretty shallow. In fact, the only weird part about eating horse was that, unlike with bacon or rib eye, we kept picturing the animal, which was kind of gross. Nonetheless, until I decide to stop my less-than-noble practice of eating other animals, I've got little choice but to order up some more horse.
(Joel Stein is the author of this article.)

I pretty much agree. While I don't eat meat, unless it comes from an animal whose life and care I knew well (I eat pork sausage from my farm), I don't see any problem with eating horse--or rabbit, or guinea pig, or whatever. Animals are animals, and they all are capable of suffering. No domestic mammal is hurt more or less from a trip to the slaughterhouse, or from a life in a stall, pen, or cage.

Comments

[roaming.livejournal.com]

I'm curious how one can do that when one has loved an animal (your dogs) directly. How can you dissociate from the others and not see them all as the same in spirit?

(I personally think that if humans have a "soul" -- which I'm not convinced of, I simply don't know -- then there's no reason animals don't either. I don't think intelligence or self-awareness is the defining factor.)

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

I dissociate individual animals from their species all the time. It's built into working at a zoo that's a working farm and a wildlife sanctuary. I eat sausage from a pig that I've pet (and was named "Mocha Chip"I). Just because one animal is a pet it doesn't mean that you can never eat an animal of that species. I hope to have pet chickens some day.

[roaming.livejournal.com]

I know that people can do it, obviously. :-) I'm not sure it's "built in". For one personal, first-hand example: years ago friends of mine who lived in Vermont bought pigs with the intention of eating/selling them. A few months down the road, the pigs were pets because, they told me, they "had personalities" and were affectionate and intelligent. For them, rather than being able to dissociate pet versus meat, once one of the kind became a "companion animal", they couldn't continue to see the others as meat on the hoof, any more than they could eat their own.

Obviously it's a person by person thang. :-)

Frankly, though, I'd much rather eat meat that had been well treated and well loved and humanely/kindly/personally slaughtered by "loving" hands than what we get with factory farming conveyor belt methods.