In the modern world, most people and cultures have rejected the flesh of horses (and its equine relatives, the mule and the donkey) as unfit to eat. But the reasons for avoidance are not necessarily the same everywhere. In some places, the horse is a rare, even absent, animal, so that people have had little opportunity to find out what they were missing. Aside from Iceland, few horses have been kept in the Arctic or Subarctic, primarily because of the large effort needed to store a sufficient amount of fodder to get the animal through long winters. The tropics have not had big horse populations, either. Tropical forests neither suit the horse’s food requirements nor favor its physiological well-being. Moreover, in much of Africa, the presence of trypanosomiasis has excluded horses from large areas.
In most parts of the world where the horse is found, neither its meat nor its milk is used. Part of this avoidance can be attributed to religious injunction. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and, at one time, Christians have all proscribed horsemeat from the diet as a badge of their faith. Orthodox Jews include it as one of the forbidden items in their Levitical list of animals because horses neither chew the cud nor have cloven hooves. Muslims are enjoined in the Koran to eschew this flesh, a prohibition that, perhaps, grew out of the social context of Arab desert oases, where the horse was a luxury animal owned by sheikhs. Horsemeat is not eaten by most Hindus (except for untouchable groups) because it is a flesh food in a primarily vegetarian culture.
Marginalization of horsemeat in Europe had a religious basis. As Christianity spread through Teutonic lands, clerics regarded hippophagy (eating horseflesh) as a pagan residue that was tinged with barbarism. In prehistoric Ireland, horseflesh was eaten in ritual contexts, a practice that survived into the early Middle Ages. A chronicler in the twelfth century described such an occasion in which priestly sexual intercourse with a mare, sacrifice, and consumption of the flesh were involved (Giraldus Cambrensis 1982). Such behavior, outrageous to Christians, explains why horse-meat had such a bad reputation as the continent became more fully Christianized. Boniface, missionary to the Germans, undertook what amounted to a personal lobbying campaign to, successfully as it turned out, persuade the pope to place horseflesh into the forbidden category. Such a ban was certainly not based on health or scripture, but horsemeat, nonetheless, became the only specific food outlawed in the history of Christianity. Today, although most people in the Christian tradition still avoid the flesh of equines, its rejection no longer has much to do with a religious prohibition. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia makes no effort to recall this old taboo that had been part of canon law. Rejection can now be attributed mainly to fear of the unfamiliar. The status of the horse as an intelligent companion of humans has surely worked against experimentation with consuming its flesh, except in periods of severe food shortage.
Marvin Harris (1985) has argued that underlying these prohibitions was a stark ecological fact: The horse was an inefficient converter of grass to meat, and when compared to cattle, horses have a higher metabolic rate and a gestation period lasting two months longer. However, as H. B. Barclay (1989) points out, horses also have various advantages over cattle. They enjoy a longer life span and have greater stamina and endurance. In winter pastures, horses, unlike cattle, can paw beneath the snow to graze. Moreover, in central Asia, mare’s milk yields are as high as those of cows.
In spite of early religious and later social reprobation, Europe did undergo a hippophagy movement that to some extent changed attitudes toward this meat and, as such, represents a notable case of how a food taboo broke down. Hippophagic experimentation in Europe was widespread around the middle of the nineteenth century, when conscious efforts were made to break with the old prejudice against selling and eating horseflesh. Denmark legalized its sale in 1841, as did the German state of Wurttemburg; Bavaria followed in 1842, and Prussia in 1843. Other countries (Norway, Sweden, Austria, and Switzerland) also legalized its sale. Russia, where horsemeat has had a historic culinary role, never banned the sale of horsemeat in the first place.
World History
