Horsemeat prejudice

Monday, 21 December 2009 05:00

December 21, 1917. Horsemeat was advocated, and sometimes even tried, during the First World War, prompting the Toronto Weekly Sun to reprint this item from the Chicago Breeders' Gazette.

The use of horseflesh for food is advocated by correspondents in your column, who assert that the popular aversion to this food is due to prejudice. This is true. It is also true that the popular aversion to cannibalism is due to prejudice. Eminent and well-known cannibals aver that human flesh is the most delicate of all foods. Yet, in spite of this well-known fact the popular prejudice persists against the findings of intellectualism and science…

Any man who does not at least respect the horse has that most fearful of all diseases, "fatty degeneration of the soul." The friend and servant of man through numberless generations—the proudest, the most graceful of all the beasts of the field—the horse has retained his nobility of eye, bearing and character in spite of centuries of neglect and abuse and servile degradation. He serves willingly—and too often receives the whip in place of oats—and too often suffocates in filthy stables instead of racing among green pastures in the wind.

Broken by the toil of a score of years, let his poor, galled, mangy, spavined, underfed, stringy carcass be devoured by the pot-bellied materialists of an unromantic age. Or let him—the erstwhile pet of fair women, the bearer of captains and kings—serve forth a wedding feast or a Sunday School picnic.

Let us by all means hasten the end of whatever natural sentiment, in spite of red war, abides in the hearts of men. Let us unite—for in union there is strength—to make nature in reality "red in tooth and claw," and to bring man to that ideal which he so ardently strives—the lowest of the predatory animals.