Americans prefer not to eat horses. So, we avoid an obvious answer to the excessive wild horse populations on public lands.
Horses are back in the news. Federal officials again ruled out slaughtering horses for food even though there are far too many horses on public lands in the west. Remember this post on Crosscut two months ago? "Saving Horses from Slaughter, Such an American Idea":
"I guess I was naive," says one woman, "I had no idea what happened to race horses when they retire." Well, duh, lady. Same thing that happens to any other farm animal past its prime.
Reaction came swiftly from Bruce King, a local entrepreneur who's now into farming and writes a blog called "Meat, Raising Animals for Food in Western Washington." His answer: repeal the ban on the slaughter of horses in the U.S., a law that forces horses to Mexico and Canada.
"What does horse taste like?" King asks. "That's a question that you, as an American Citizen, probably can't answer. We just don't eat them. They're edible, and other countries do, but we don't."
Well, the Candians are paying attention. In the Globe and Mail, there's an article headlined "Why You Should Eat Horsemeat: It's Delicious"!
And so it is. Here's a horsemeat butcher shop in Venice, where they know what's tasty: "Puledro," that yummy-looking chunk of meat in the window, that's Italian for colt or foal. Now, we're squeamish about horses in this country. We don't like to think of horses as food, but a horse isn't that much different from a cow, is it? Plenty of people, even today, eat small game like squirrel, but most Americans don't eat rabbits or chickens.
Wait, wait! Of course we eat chickens. What do you think we are, nuts?
