Horse meat

• 1. Introduction

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  Horse meat is a staple of kitchens in many parts of Europe and Asia, and a forbidden food in many others. The eight countries that eat the most of it consume the meat of about 4.3 million horses every year. That is an enormous number for a food that large parts of the world refuse to touch.

  Why does the same animal count as dinner in one country and as a companion in the next? How did ancient hunters, popes, besieged cities and modern regulators each shape what ends up on the plate? And what happens when a meat that many people reject quietly turns up in products sold under another name?

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• 2. Ancient Hunters

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  At Boxgrove in southern England, horse bones scarred with cut marks date to around 500,000 years ago. One horse shoulder blade may even carry the wound of a spear. Acheulean stone tools lie among the bones, made by Homo heidelbergensis, an archaic human species.

  At Schöningen in Germany, butchered horses were found beside wooden spears around 300,000 years old. These are among the oldest wooden spears known, and the same species is thought to have made them. The Lingjing site in Henan, China, dates to 125-90,000 years ago and shows that horse butchery happened in Asia too.

  During the Upper Palaeolithic, modern humans hunted horses across Europe and Asia. In the Americas, the Paleoindians, the first people to settle there, hunted the native horses shortly before those animals went extinct. Over time, hunting gave way to herding, and people began raising horses for meat, milk and transport.

  In the 15th and 16th centuries, Spaniards and then other European settlers brought horses back to the Americas. Some escaped and went feral. The Pehuenche people of what is now Chile and Argentina began to hunt them. Other nomadic tribes in Chile abandoned an economy built on the guanaco and rebuilt it around the multiplying herds. In the high Andes, the meat is still sun-dried into charqui.

  Back in Europe, meanwhile, the horse was acquiring a very different kind of importance, as an offering to the gods.

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• 3. Sacred Horses and Papal Bans

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  Roman sources describe Epona, a triple-aspect goddess worshipped widely in Gaul and southern Britain. She protected horses and those who kept them, and horses were sacrificed in her honor. The Irish Macha and the Welsh Rhiannon are seen as her parallels. In The White Goddess, Robert Graves argued that Britons and their descendants avoided horse meat because of Epona worship and even earlier rites. The Uffington White Horse is probable evidence of ancient horse worship.

  Elsewhere, sacrifice and feasting went together. The ancient Kshatriyas of India practiced horse sacrifice and ate horse meat, including in the Ashwamedha Yajna recorded in the Vedas, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. In that ritual, the horse was smothered rather than struck down. In 1913, the Finnic Mari people of the Volga region were observed carrying out a horse sacrifice. Jewish dietary law, by contrast, forbids horse meat outright, because horses neither chew cud nor have cloven hooves.

  In ancient Scandinavia, a horse was a working animal, a mark of its owner's status and a symbol within Old Norse religion. Horses were slaughtered for the gods, and the worshippers ate the meat at religious feasts. In pre-Christian Norway, eating a horse displayed great wealth. Sacrificing one was the greatest gift a person could offer. When the Nordic countries turned Christian, eating horse became a sign of heresy.

  In 732, Pope Gregory III began a determined effort to end the ritual eating of horse meat. Later in the eighth century, Gregory and Pope Zachary instructed Saint Boniface, missionary to the Germans, to forbid it among his converts. Even so, horse meat stayed on tables across much of Europe through the Middle Ages.

  Iceland offers the sharpest example. The Icelanders are said to have resisted Christianity for a time largely because it meant giving up horse. When the pagan Norse Icelanders adopted the new faith in the year 1000, eating horse was banned. The ban took such deep root that most people would not even handle the meat. Even in the harsh famines of the 18th century, most refused it, and those who ate it were castigated. The ban was decriminalised in 1757, yet distaste lingered well into the 19th century, and horse was often read as a sign of poverty. In 2015, it made up only 3.2 percent of Icelandic meat production.

  Hungary followed its own path. Horse meat was eaten there even after conversion to Christianity in the 11th century. Consumption fell sharply after the Mongol invasion of 1241-1242 and vanished by the Ottoman occupation of the mid-16th century.

  Gregory's penal law was finally abrogated by the 1983 Code of Canon Law. Catholics today may eat horse, except on abstinence days. In France, though, it was revolution rather than religion that put horses back on the plate.

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• 4. Revolution and Siege

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  When the French aristocracy fell, the people who had served it had to find new ways to live. The horses that nobles had kept as signs of prestige ended up feeding the hungry masses. France dates its taste for horse meat to this upheaval.

  The Napoleonic wars deepened the habit. Baron Dominique-Jean Larrey, surgeon-in-chief of Napoleon's Grand Army, urged starving troops to eat horse. At the siege of Alexandria, the meat of young Arab horses relieved an epidemic of scurvy. At the battle of Eylau in 1807, Larrey served horse as soup and as bœuf à la mode. In 1809 at Aspern-Essling, cut off from supplies, cavalrymen cooked in the breastplates of fallen cuirassiers and seasoned the meat with gunpowder. That practice lasted until at least the Waterloo campaign.

  In 1866, during the later years of the Second French Empire, the government legalized the eating of horse meat. Living costs in Paris were so high that many workers could not afford pork or beef. The first butcher's shop specializing in horse opened in eastern Paris and sold good meat at lower prices.

  The Siege of Paris of 1870-1871 changed the city's habits again. Estimates suggest between 65,000 and 70,000 horses were butchered and eaten, alongside donkeys and mules. Horses also competed with people for grain, which made them harder to justify keeping. Not even champions were spared. Two horses that Alexander II of Russia had given to Napoleon III were slaughtered. Fresh supplies still ran short in the end. Many Parisians nevertheless acquired a taste for the meat, and it stayed popular after the war.

  Specialized horse butchers, the boucheries chevalines, long held a near monopoly, since ordinary butcher shops were forbidden to sell it. In 2023, the last remaining horse butcher in Paris announced his retirement and said the meat was going out of fashion.

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• 5. Table Around the World

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  In Japan, raw horse meat is called sakura, the word for cherry blossom, because of its pink color. Sliced thin and dipped in soy sauce, it becomes basashi, often served with ginger, onions, garlic or shiso leaves. Kumamoto, Nagano and Ōita are famous for it, and it is also common in the Tōhoku region. Basashi turns up on the menus of izakaya bars, and horse also appears in yakiniku barbecue under the names baniku and bagushi.

  In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the nomadic past still shapes the diet. Kazy sausage uses the animal's own intestines as the skin. Zhaya comes from hip meat that is smoked and boiled. Jal is made from neck fat treated the same way, and sur-et is dried meat. One salted version is smoked over elm, juniper or meadowsweet. In Mongolia, some people prefer horse during the brutal winter because of its low cholesterol. They keep it unfrozen and believe it helps warm the body.

  In Yogyakarta, Indonesia, cooks grill horse satay, called sate jaran, and serve it with shallot, pepper and sweet soy sauce. People there believe it gives a man vitality. China is more divided. In Guilin there are horse meat rice noodles, and in Huishui County in Guizhou there is horse meat hot pot. Elsewhere in China the meat is unpopular. The Ming dynasty Compendium of Materia Medica by Li Shizhen calls it poisonous and warns it can cause folliculitis or death. In 2005, China still led the world in consumption at 421,000 tonnes.

  Per 100 grams, raw horse holds about 21 grams of protein and 5 of fat. Raw beef strip steak holds 23 and 3. Horse tastes slightly sweet, close to beef, and younger animals give paler meat. A 2007 Time magazine writer called it "a sweet, rich, superlean, oddly soft meat, and closer to beef than to venison". In Serbia, doctors often recommend it to people with anemia, and in Spain it is commonly served to anemic children.

  Belgium has a deep repertoire. Lokeren is known for its horse sausage, and the Flemish region around the Rupel River is famous for schep, a stew of shoulder cut, brown ale, onions and mustard. It arrives with fries, mayonnaise and raw endive salad. In Germany, Cologne and Düsseldorf restaurants offer Sauerbraten made with horse, and Swabia has its Pferderostbraten. Slovenia even has a fast-food chain called Hot' Horse.

  Italy may love it most. Sicily, especially around Catania, treats horse as part of its historic cuisine. Verona has its stew called pastissada, and Bari builds horse into its ragù barese. Parma serves a horse tartare called pesto di cavallo. The Festa del Cavallo in Legnaro, near Padua, is dedicated entirely to horses, including eating them. In Veneto the habit goes back to at least 1000 BC, to the Adriatic Veneti, who sacrificed horses to their goddess Reitia or to the hero Diomedes. Their white horses were famous among Greeks and Romans for circus racing.

  British food writer Matthew Fort explains the Italian appetite this way: "In the frugal, unsentimental manner of agricultural communities, all the animals were looked on as a source of protein. Waste was not an option."

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• 6. Roots of Aversion

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  In 1851, Henry Mayhew set London beside Paris in London Labour and the London Poor. Londoners rejected the horse carcass, while France and Germany kept eating it. German and French knackers often sold carcasses despite the papal ban, and wild horses were still hunted for meat in Westphalia. Londoners also suspected that horse was slipping into their sausages and that offal sold as ox was really equine.

  Britain's taboo was never total. Horse and donkey were eaten there, especially in Yorkshire, until the 1930s. They also appeared in times of war, much as whale meat did, and neither food won lasting favor. Today in the United Kingdom it is legal to slaughter, prepare and eat horses. But it is rare, and most of what is sold is imported from the south of France.

  Scholars have offered several explanations. Anthropologist Marvin Harris proposed that some cultures reject horse because it turns grass into meat less efficiently than ruminants do. A study by Fred Simoons suggested that American avoidance owes less to Gregory's old ban than to simple unfamiliarity. In other places, horse carries the stigma of a cheap substitute for pork or beef that poor people eat. Chile, for instance, associates it with lower social strata.

  Opposition can be fierce. In the United States, the United Kingdom and Greece, horses are seen mainly as companions and sporting animals. In ancient Greece, horse slaughter was forbidden by law, and it remains so today. French former actress Brigitte Bardot spent years campaigning against horse eating. Yet opinion is not unanimous. A 2007 readers' poll in the London magazine Time Out found that 82 percent of respondents supported chef Gordon Ramsay serving horse in his restaurants.

  That same year, an episode of Ramsay's series The F Word featured Janet Street-Porter persuading locals to try it. She was forced to move her stand to private land after controversy. She pitched it as beef-like but leaner, rich in omega-3 fatty acids and a safer choice amid worries about bird flu and mad cow disease. Many viewers stayed skeptical.

  In Tonga, horse meat is eaten nationally, and Tongan emigrants in the United States, New Zealand and Australia kept the taste, saying Christian missionaries introduced it. Methodist missionary George Daniel wrote about a breeding pair that James Cook left during his second Oceanic voyage. They were slaughtered not long after. In 1983, a firm from Hartford, Connecticut, offered horse meat to Salt Lake City's Tongan Mormon community at their request. Strong opposition from other Mormons made the firm drop its plans.

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• 7. America's Ban

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  For decades, American horses were killed by the tens of thousands, but not for people. From the 1920s into the 1950s or 1960s, with a brief pause in the Second World War, companies canned horse meat as dog food, most famously under the name Ken-L Ration. By the 1930s, over 50,000 horses were bred and slaughtered each year for that demand. Horse meat was outlawed in American pet food in the 1970s.

  Since the 1960s, all horse meat made in the United States was meant for export, mostly to the European Union. The country had three horse slaughterhouses left until 2007. Court orders closed them after judges upheld statutes in Illinois and Texas banning horse slaughter and the sale of horse meat. In 1998, California voters had already made it a misdemeanor to slaughter horses or sell their meat for human consumption. Illinois passed Public Act 95-02 in 2007, and New Jersey, Oklahoma and Mississippi also ban slaughter or sale.

  Congress has never passed a national ban, though bills have been introduced regularly since 2001. A budget provision blocks federal money for the inspections that plants need to sell across state lines or export. That provision has applied since 2007. It was lifted briefly in 2011, then returned in the FY2014 Agriculture Appropriations Act and later budgets. The result is that no domestic horse slaughter operation can run, and a poll figure holds that 83 percent of Americans support a national ban.

  The horses did not stop moving. Live exports go from states including Texas to slaughterhouses in Canada or Mexico. By 2009, Mexico had become the largest producer of horse meat in the world, though its own people rarely eat it. At Fort MacLeod in Alberta, the Swiss television show Kassensturz reported poor animal conditions at Bouvry Exports in 2013. Migros, the main importer of horse meat into Switzerland, worked with Bouvry on welfare, then cut ties in 2015 because the improvements fell short. Migros had set itself the goal of bringing all foreign suppliers up to strict Swiss standards by 2020.

  The taboo flared again in May 2017, when a Pittsburgh restaurant in Lawrenceville served horse tartare at an event with French Canadian guest chefs. Serving it is legal in Pennsylvania. The USDA still inspected the restaurant and warned it not to do so again, and a Change.org petition soon urged making it illegal.

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• 8. Traceability Trouble

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  Ferdinand won the 1986 Kentucky Derby and the 1987 Eclipse Award for Horse of the Year. He is believed to have been slaughtered in Japan, probably for pet food. His fate shows how even prestigious horses can end up in the food chain.

  In Western countries, horses are poor converters of grass and grain into meat, so they are rarely bred for it. Owners instead sell animals whose value for riding or work has fallen. Southern English ponies from the New Forest, Exmoor and Dartmoor are routinely exported this way. British law demands equine passports, even for semiferal horses, so that animals can be traced. Most slaughter happens in the United Kingdom, and the animals travel as carcasses. Ex-racehorses and auction horses can enter the chain too, and some have been stolen or bought under false pretenses.

  Traceability matters because of medicine. Meat from horses put down by lethal injection is unfit to eat, since the toxin remains in the meat. Rules on other drugs vary by place. Canada says hyaluron in the HY-50 preparation should not be given to horses bound for slaughter, while Europe sees no such effect on edibility.

  Fraud thrives where tracing fails. In the Australian meat substitution scandal of 1981, horse and kangaroo meat were intentionally mislabeled as beef for export. Australian horse meat exports peaked at 9,327 tons in 1986. In 2003, a Food Standards Agency investigation found that some sausages, salami, chorizo and pastrami contained unlisted horse meat.

  The biggest shock came in 2013. German authorities detected horse meat in prepared foods, including frozen lasagna declared as beef. DNA sampling by the Irish company IdentiGEN had led to the discovery of horse in the European food chain. Some products recalled in Britain contained up to 100 percent horse. The scandal pushed the EU to speed up its recommendations for labeling the origin of all processed meat.

  The problem has not gone away. On the 1st of December 2022, Europol and the Spanish Civil Guard announced the arrest of 41 people in a criminal enterprise selling untraceable horse meat to Spanish, Belgian and German markets. It had made illegal profits of EUR 1.5 million. In 2024, an RTÉ News investigation found that horses once judged unfit for human consumption had their identities altered by swapping microchips and passports. In some cases, live horses were shipped abroad to get new identities.

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