Sunday, December 04, 2011

Following up

This article on NPR does a good job of condensing and crystallizing some of the points I tried to make in my earlier post about the challenges around horse slaughter. (Yes, I know my thoughts are not original, but they have simmered for so long, they needed an out.)

I would not personally eat horse meat (I find it a little surreal that the NPR story is on their Food Blog), and I agree whole-heartedly that--as it is practiced--horse slaughter is a horrible process. But at the risk of repeating myself, the issue is not black and white and it is not easily solved. (To see my personal opinion, scroll back a couple articles on the blog--I really don't think I could write that all out again.)

Sarah, over at Miles on Miles, also reiterated the very valid--and hopefully hugely deterrent--argument that we put some nasty stuff in our horses to keep them healthy or to relieve pain in performance horses.

I originally had a paragraph that talked specifically about that, but as I restructured my article, it ended up  not being relevant to the point I decided was important--if only to me--so I cut it out.

She's absolutely right, of course, and if it makes one less person decide eating horse meat is a bad idea, I'll keep shouting it from the roof tops, too. Less demand will hopefully also lead to less supply, if only because the profit motive will be removed or at least diminished.

It still means we have to deal with the supply issue as a whole, and until we get our arms around that, we will have a horse slaughter dilemma in this country.

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