Finland still carries horse meat, but it's still a rarity, as nobody grows horses for making meat, and it's just adult horses that were put down for some other reason. The nice thing about it being so rare is that it's really cheap! You might get a good horse steak from the meat counter half the price of the best beef steaks, and it's much better than any beef steak I've ever eaten in any country.
Reindeer steaks on the other hand, those are among the best steaks made out of any animal I've eaten. There the price comes from the fact that reindeer herds need hundreds if not thousands of square kilometres to roam freely. The good thing is that Finland has 123 000 sqkms of wilderness (roughly the size of Greece or Mississippi) officially dedicated for herding reindeer!
The reason for it being rare here in Finland is the lack of demand.
Most horses that are put down would be perfectly fine for human consumption, but slaughterhouses do not buy them for the aforementioned reason. The primary consumer of horse meat in Finland is the sausage industry, and they buy cheap South American meat by ton.
"The nice thing about it being so rare is that it's really cheap!" Not to be picky, but it has everything to do with there being no demand for that meat. In Poland, we have a very small population of native Bison, which is under extreme protection - but nevertheless, sometimes they have to be killed to protect the herd or for some other reasons. When they are, the meat goes for thousands of euros on the international market because it's such a rarity.
I think that's just personal taste :) I remember eating fried pigs brain, rolled in flour, and it was delicious. Also, pigs testicles are quite good if fried in a certain way (with lots of garlic and wine), but disgusting in every other way I tried.
If you ever find yourself in northern Italy, near Lake Como, I highly suggest a trip to this little place called Alva Market. It's a food mecca; the place Italians make a trip to on a Sunday just to eat good pizzoccheri (buckwheat pasta with potatoes, greens, and cheese) or polenta taragna (buckwheat polenta with a dangerous amount of taleggio cheese). Everything there is homemade or coming from the nearby valleys; they raise their own livestock, make their own cheese, cure their own salumi. My visit is easily one of the best food experiences of my life and the highlght of everything I've done and eaten in Italy.
What they're most known for is their bresaola. The've got a number of different kinds; beef, goat, etc., but what I was most enamored of was the horse bresaola. It was a slender cut of meat, allowing the rosemary, juniper, and other spices to really come through in each slice. The horse itself was quite sweet. Deep purpleish red. Truly incredible.
Another incredible horse meat delicacy in Italy is the "pesto di cavallo" from Parma: imagine a tartare, but without all the yolk and capers bullshit and made of horse rather than beef…
And in Italy is strictly forbidden to slaughter work-horses for human consumption, though sometimes they crack down on an illegal butchery in Sicily, in the north you should be fairly safe.
Parma is an incredible town for food, and the whole Emilia-Romagna region is worth an extended visit. I spent 2 weeks exploring the area last summer and loved it.
Within a 30 mile radius of Parma, you can sample some of the best fruits and vegetables, stuffed pastas (ravioli), Parmesan cheese, balsamic vinegar, wine, and sausages in the world -- almost unbelievably cheaply! If you're looking for pesto di cavallo in particular, there's a great sandwich shop in Parma called Pepèn that I'd suggest.
When I was a kid my mother did tartare de cheval (raw minced horse meat) every saturday; there was an equine butcher shop right in front of our apartment building in Paris.
Now it's been a while since I've had horse meat, but I remember it to be pretty good.
What I don't know is why there should be a special butcher shop specifically for horse meat? In a regular butcher shop you can buy many other animal products than just beef (pork, rabbit, duck, chicken, lamb, etc.) so what's so special about horse?
Its so very very easy to substitute horse for beef and cut costs. I imagine the separation is to try to eliminate even the appearance of that possibility. Same reason you don't see "Yoshi Sushi House" and "Bob's Live Bait" under the same roof.
In China the most popular is donkey meat, or 驴肉 (lvrou, pronounced lew-row*). For those who don't study characters, the left-hand part of 驴 is 马 ( horse), which is the simplified form of the traditional character 馬 which is what the Japanese are still using, and has a reconstructed proto Sino-Caucasian root.[0] It's all over China but more popular perhaps in the north, Shandong and northern Jiangsu in the east to Xinjiang in the west. Of course part of this culinary capacity descends from earlier nomadic and steppe peoples. You can also try Mongol horse milk alcohol, which is now available right across China in bottled form.
I think it's fair to say that in the past, most people ate most meat, as long as it was fresh and there were no local taboos. I haven't read any studies but for bacterial reasons I suppose that raw consumption correlates with cold climates.
If you go back to Japan, I highly recommend trying it. It is one of my favourite foods. Horse meat has a nicer flavour than beef, and especially eaten raw it is amazing. Unfortunately horse meat is quite rare where I live (Shizuoka prefecture), so I only usually get to eat it when I'm travelling.
I often wonder where the meat comes from though. Do they use young horses, or old, for instance? Also, the basashi I've had seems like it might be the tenderloin (it is very tender), so I wonder what happens to the rest of the animal. I'd very happily use it in stews if I could get it.
I'd avoid eating anything in Venice unless you know a local.
They'll charge foreigners one price, people from the Veneto another, and locals a third (cheaper) price. And that's if it's a decent place to eat, rather than one of the many very tourist-oriented locales where anyone local would never set foot.
Grocery stores are key. Especially the chain ones where everything has a barcode. I agree the dining out situation there (and in Italy in general) was a bit hostile/weird, but the rest of the vacation made up for it ten fold...even if I never found out what horse tasted like.
>I agree the dining out situation there (and in Italy in general) was a bit hostile/weird
How do you mean? I've really found the opposite to be true. It's something I love most about Italy; you can find good food prepared by people who are passionate about their food for relatively cheap, and it's always unfussy.
In Rome, my wife and I tried to share a (normal sized) pizza on the patio of an almost empty restaurant. We were told we weren't allowed to share and would have to order two entrees if we wanted to stay. The place we ended up eating lunch had a guy come over every 30 seconds and try to upsell us, and we were completely ignored once it was clear we weren't going to buy anything else. That was our first day, and it didn't get any better. Maybe we were just unlucky, but it seemed like a theme.
Sorry that you had such an unpleasant meal. That sounds like a typical big city touristy place. I don't think you should expect that experience elsewhere, especially outside of major cities.
I've spent more time in smaller towns in Italy, but even in Rome I was able to find good non-touristy places. I've been to places like you describe and they suck.
I think there's a big difference between eating out in really touristy spots, and pretty much anywhere outside them, where you're pretty likely to get a great meal at a good price in a nice atmosphere.
This is highly exagerated! Nowadays there are guides, yelp, tripadvisor and the like. Especially in the medium to high end there are plenty of places with reasonable prices and very good food. Antiche Carampane is a classic for fish, though I've recently tried Il Ridotto and it was amazing. If you want to go on the cheap local students swear by Il Nono Risorto.
Just walk a little bit out of the main tourist thoroughfares, and don't go anywhere that has pictures on the menu, has a touristic menu, or makes both seafood and pizza.
Day trip from Padova or elsewhere, and bring sandwiches along. There are trains that run pretty late, so you can spend a long day there. If needs be, there are some ok pizza options and things like that near Campo Santa Margherita.
But you'll get much more for your money by eating somewhere outside of Venice, unless you know someone.
I lived in Padova for 15 years, speak fluent Italian, and the only time I ever felt like a got a good meal there was when I went to a place with a local my wife knew who did all the talking for us.
Definitely go to Venice, but as a tourist I found the most of the restaurants where among the worst I've eaten at in Italy, even places among places that had pretty good tripadvisor reviews. Buy food at the market or deli and make your own meals.
Yes, there's absolutely no reason to believe pigs suffer less than dogs. In fact, they have similar cognitive levels. So we need to do some mental gymnastics to justify how we treat them.
This behavior is labeled "moral schizophrenia" by some.
We say that we recognize that animals are sentient and therefore deserve moral consideration and freedom from unnecessary suffering, but we often behave toward them as insentient things and treat them in ways that are diametrically opposed to any moral consideration of their interests. Unless we label them as pets, of course. Then they are automatically included in our circle of compassion.
I think you make it sound more callous and arbitrary than it is.
It's simple: we have an alliance with dogs and treat them as our friends. Had truffle pigs been as common as hunting dogs, we wouldn't eat as much bacon. Now that this alliance is vestigial, we may see it decay - perhaps you don't believe in it.
Honestly, we probably feel more brotherhood with our work animals than we do with citizens of opposing countries. Makes sense, if someone came to rob your house the Soviets wouldn't bark.
Then, there is the idea that dogs reciprocate. We know at least some do, and we know that nearly every dog owner will claim that theirs does, and we know that a sufficiently inbred poodle won't have the faculty for it. Ether way, we are all told that dogs our our buddies who want to help us. Who would eat a buddy that wanted to help you? How many bacon-eaters think that the pig would, if it could, keep them safe and help them find other things to eat? Probably none.
(Note: I know that there are pig pets. Maybe they are friends, like dogs. If that's true, get the word out and porkchops stop tomorrow.)
This is certainly how I feel about dogs and horses. They're both useful animals. I think the fact that they both have exposed sclera helps cement the alliance.
1) We domesticated horses and dogs to perform a service, not serve as food. These animals were not bred to be flavorful.
2) If you are eating a service animal, that implies it was either too sick or too old to be of service. An old or sick animal is unlikely to yield quality meat.
3) Domestication is a powerful force. With great power comes great responsibility. Warning, the next paragraph is dark.
One of the most abominable animal abuses comes from eating dogs. Dogs are bred to be timid and sensitive. Consequently they are easily tormented. While it is an uncommon practice, in rural Korea dogs are tormented prior to butchering and then served in such a way to give the consumer an adrenaline buzz. These dogs are also a special farm-breed that is more flavorful.
The above story was told to me by several hosts while I was in Korea.
2) Based on the article, the horse butcher claims that all their meat was from working horses, but that they were butchered before the "prime" of their life (before 9 years) or after 14 years because the meat is more tender then. These working horses are fed a good diet, so the meat is supposedly good tasting compared to farmed animals who are fed specific food to get them fat & large faster.
The contradictory way in which we see one living creature's value over another is the reason I became a vegetarian. We bred dogs to be (insert reason that's not food) we also bred cows to be (insert reason that is food), We are the factor here, not the animals. Just because we bred animals to be a specific way doesn't itself justify the industrial slaughter of one versus another.
With that said, my choice was: embrace eating dog, or stop eating meat. I chose the latter, but I fully support anyone who chooses the former, but hope they don't do so under the premise that one animal we control is somehow more appropriate to kill and eat than another.
> With that said, my choice was: embrace eating dog, or stop eating meat.
Why is that the choice? I'm not eating dog since there is no way I can ensure that the dog was treated with some minimum level of care before being killed. Probably a lot of the meat I eat was not killed in the most ideal conditions, but I like to think that I am buying better raised animals these days.
> The contradictory way in which we see one living creature's value over another is the reason I became a vegetarian.
My idea is that if we look at the economic value of animals it becomes less contradictory. Some animals taste good, can be put to work, give us enjoyment, provide materials we can use, are cute, are just fascinating etc. We're willing to bear the cost of keeping these around in some way. Others have really little going for them, e.g. the mosquito.
> The contradictory way in which we see one living creature's value over another
Just playing Devil's advocate here - what's contradictory about assuming that humans are the most important thing in the universe and everything else is here to serve us? I'm not saying it's the ethical thing to do, but contradictory is not a charge I'd level.
An old or sick animal is unlikely to yield quality meat.
A sick animal is unlikely to yield quality meat. (Or at least, much meat, even if the quality is fine. Ask me how I know!) The older an animal gets, however, the richer and more intense the flavors can become. We eat young steers, barrows, and chickens because it costs less to feed an animal for 18 months than it does to feed it for ten years, not because the taste is necessarily better. Of course there are many other factors that affect flavor and quality of meat, but it's wrong to assume that younger is better.
2) true, but you'll find looking at places which had traditionally high rate of horse meat consumption that they also used to had a local chivalry military garrison. those are the horses that were used back then for consumption, because they weren't as hardened as work animals and they ended their useful life before being totally spent.
It's certainly true that there is a wide and long history of eating dog meat around the world [1]. However, I think a distinction can be made between eating the meat of a herbivore (horses) and eating the meat of a carnivore/omnivore (dogs). And I'd suggest that it is healthier to eat the meat of herbivores.
> However, I think a distinction can be made between eating the meat of a herbivore (horses) and eating the meat of a carnivore/omnivore (dogs).
What distinction would that be? People eat bear-meat, hogs are at least partially omnivorous, and virtually every food species of fish and seafood is carnivorous. Or else a carrion-eater, like lobsters.
In the US at least, horses are not raised for meat. This means that veterinarians use whatever drugs they deem necessary when treating horses many of which might make the meat toxic.
I've had this told to me by several horse people including my wife and a horse vet but don't know how true it actually is.
The dangers of drugs in horse meat are vastly exaggerated by those opposed to eating horse meat. The thing to remember is that drugs, especially those that might pose a problem, are expensive. As such, they might be in common use for e.g. valuable Thoroughbred stallions in Lexington KY but are vanishingly rare for swaybacked old "killer" horses fending for themselves on weeds and thornbushes on someone's back forty. Sure they might have been "worth" such drugs when they were younger, but that was years ago. Experience from cattle drugs indicates that everything is out of the system in 60 days.
Well, the other way around as well: those animals have evolved special feelings for us. It's harder to eat something when our conscience gets in the way...
Pigs have too. If you raise them like pets they will have that same thing. There is no difference and people are hypocrites valuing one life over another that way.
Edit; the will is do here; I had pet pigs and did not eat them, they are smart(er than dogs) and very rapidly bored. But a lot of fun. Very happy animals in the right environment.
Britain's Princess Anne recently suggested that eating horse being taken more seriously in Britain [1]. There is a glut of horses in the UK, most of which (unless a particular breed) are effectively worth nothing.
A lot of horses just get abandoned on spare fields in what is called "fly grazing".
I very much remember the Chevaline butcher shops as a child and even as an adult 20 years ago. Times have changed (though I have never had any desire to eat horse).
I'm fascinated by how irrational people are about food. In California, it's a felony to slaughter a horse. And that isn't some old law that no one's bothered to repeal, it came about through a ballot initiative in 1998. A few other US states have bans, and the federal government allocates zero dollars to the mandatory screening of any horse meat factories, so it's effectively banned nationwide. I don't see how it's anyone else's business what I do with an animal that belongs to me. Especially eating it, which is in the natural order of things.
As mentioned in the interview, there was a massive scandal in Europe about horse meat being substituted for beef in some products. No one would have batted an eye if it was turkey being substituted for chicken, or lamb for beef. Regulators would obviously have punished those responsible, but the public wouldn't have cared if there was no safety issue. But horses, and everyone loses their minds. How bizarre. It's the same thing with cats and dogs. People have no problem with killing pigs, and they sure love their bacon, but a lot of those same people would throw you in jail for eating cats or dogs. I don't understand it. Yes, I get that cats and dogs are pets. Are people really willing to ruin a human being's life, just to support the fantasy that little Fluffy is a person?
>As mentioned in the interview, there was a massive scandal in Europe about horse meat being substituted for beef in some products. No one would have batted an eye if it was turkey being substituted for chicken, or lamb for beef.
The outrage in Europe was largely due to horse meat not meant for human consumption making it into the food supply chain, right? The revulsion that many Americans feel about eating horse just isn't as prevalent in Europe.
The outrage was very similar when a second meat scandal occurred in Sweden when fair trade marked high quality beef was substituted with a imported cheap alternative. No one likes being made a fool and paying 2-3 times the actually value, and different quality of meat has different amount of nutrition, water content, risk of human transferable diseases, toxics and antibiotic/environmental footprint. Most people also have a strong dislike of fraud, and do not like the knowledge that their money got into the hands of criminals.
Horse meat isn't consumed in Britain either, which is where the the mislabeled meats were discovered. I see what you're saying about the scandal though, that does seem to me like a reason to be upset.
The scandal was all over Europe, even in countries where horse meat is consumed. Problem one was substituting horse meat for beef or w/e (kind of a dick move). Problem two was using horse meat unfit for human consumption spiked with all sorts of veterinarian antibiotics (actually dangerous).
If you sell me food, I expect it is what you say it is. The horse is irrelevant beyond that it is cheap meat. I would be incredibly annoyed if I purchase American Grass Fed Beef and received Italian Pork disguised as beef.
As for some animals being more protected over others: sometimes, in a democracy, you just have to roll with the majority. We tend not to like our pets to be eaten.
I agree with you. If the majority choose to adhere to a particular cultural norm or taboo, that is their choice.
But there are also people (and it is not a small minority) trying to impose their culture and taboos on other people. Just look at all the pressure and calls for action against Chinese and Koreans over their consumption of dog-meat. Here is an example of a petition that gathered over 4 million votes (https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-yulin-dog-meat-eating-fest...)
>If you sell me food, I expect it is what you say it is. The horse is irrelevant beyond that it is cheap meat.
I agree that food should be labeled honestly. People who engage in that kind of dishonesty should be punished. But the high pitch of the outrage was very clearly because of the horse-meat taboo.
>As for some animals being more protected over others: sometimes, in a democracy, you just have to roll with the majority.
I agree, I certainly don't think people should break those laws. It's not a cause worthy of rebellion and all the harm it does. But that can't be an argument in favor of the majority's position. That would be an argument from majority, a logical fallacy. Bad ideas should be refuted.
> I don't see how it's anyone else's business what I do with an animal that belongs to me.
I'm pretty comfortable with the idea of throwing people in jail for, say, setting a cat on fire. Whether it belongs to them or not doesn't really figure into that sentiment.
(The same applies for, say, a pig. It's not about cuteness.)
Separating the two sentences that you did from the comment as a whole weakens the argument that the poster was making. You don't address the point they made about people having no qualms about eating pig meat while simultaneously forbidding the consumption of cat and dog meat. I don't see how this is a rational position.
>Also there seems to be a pretty clear dividing line between pets and food.
Maybe in the time and place in which you exist, but in others the distinction is not the same. I have a pet dog, but I also enjoy bosintang. Is there a rational basis for why I can't have bosintang in the US?
> You don't address the point they made about people
> having no qualms about eating pig meat while
> simultaneously forbidding the consumption of cat and
> dog meat
> > Also there seems to be a pretty clear dividing line
> > between pets and food
There, you quoted it just after you called it an irrational position O_o
> I have a pet dog, but I also enjoy bosintang. Is
> there a rational basis for why I can't have bosintang
> in the US?
I wonder how much research you've actually done here? Public opinion on dog meat in Korea is shifting ... pretty much in lock-step with the increase of keeping dogs as pets in Korea. Additionally, people don't keep meat breeds of dog as pets.
I wonder if you'll use historic cannabalism as an argument that humans are irrational for avoiding eating each other next?
Your comment about there being a dividing line is only restating "pigs are food, dogs and cats are pets" rather than offering a rationalization for why this is the case. Sure, there is a dividing line, but why is there a dividing line? What makes the parakeet so different from the chicken, the cat from the cow?
I'm familiar with the changing public opinion, but shifting public opinion does not constitute a rational basis. I assume that you would not approve of eating dogs if the practice was increasing in popularity. I also know that people don't keep nureongi as pets, but I'm not sure why you brought it up. Are suggesting that because they are specifically bred for slaughter this makes them OK to eat?
From my perspective I see a group of people trying to force their views on others. I'm intimately familiar with this story because I've seen it in many different forms. For example, for years my father and many of my friends did not have the right to marry in the US because of people just like you. Many justifications for this bigotry were offered, but in the end it all boiled down to "it makes me uncomfortable."
So, what's the rationale for why eating pigs is OK but eating cats and dogs is off limits? Is it just personal discomfort? Help me understand.
> I'm familiar with the changing public opinion, but shifting public opinion does not constitute a rational basis.
It often does. The Supreme Court will refuse to hear cases that it thinks should be decided by a political process. Politics is the process by which public opinion becomes law.
Whether the belief is dying out or gaining acceptance is not a rational answer to the question of why people hold the belief. So again, is grouping pigs and dogs into the respective groups of meal and pet anything other than an arbitrary distinction?
Oh, I wasn't intending to comment on the discussion you were having with the GP, just to point out a small flaw in reasoning.
But since you asked, no, it does seem rather arbitrary. I'm not sure where you wanted to go with that argument. I would not eat dog, but I happily eat pork. I don't have a rational explanation for why, but neither do I care enough about it to want to try to change it.
If I did, I would probably go in the direction of eating dog rather than to stop eating meat entirely. It would not take much to push me in that direction. A few weeks in Korea might be enough for me to get over it.
Maybe there's no hard-coded login inside a human brain that says "this is a human being, do not eat him" - but rather, the repulsion to eat something could be proportionally related to perceived easiness that thing could have a relationship with us.
From the research I've done, the main safety concern was Bute given to horses, and it seems like it's actually very rare for horsemeat to test positive for it and that when present, the amounts are not significant. Am I missing something?
>Also people do seem pretty clear on not eating animals which are also widely kept as pets, with the exception perhaps of rabbit.
I understand that apprehension. I'd probably have the same apprehension if a plate of dog meat was put in front of me, at least at first. I've had pet dogs and I cared a lot about them. But to throw someone else in jail over it? That ruins families, childhoods, and lives. Just so we can live with the fantasy that Fluffy is a person.
People are ignorant, that's why they can't put two and two together. They're brainwashed and set in their stubborn ways, or have not spent enough time with animals to realize that they don't deserve the bullshit we put them through. We're basically all Nazi's to be blunt.
I'm not even 100% against meat, primarily because I know some people will never be convinced, however the regulations regarding cruelty and laws against filming etc are total crap.
Exactly, these laws and actions are failed (or maybe successful) attempts at trying to rationalize immoral behaviour. They convince themselves - believing they are kind and compassionate - that there are humane ways to end a life, humane rape, humane slaughter, humane immoral acts. It's a comedy.
> Especially eating it, which is in the natural order of things.
Yeah, those claws that you use to hunt your food down are pretty natural.
Appeal to nature is an argument flaw and if you are rational you shouldn't use it.
Humans ate meat because they saved their energy. Do you know how they saved it? The non-human animals were walking around collecting nutrients so humans didn't have to waste that time. These non-human animals were nutrient packed and it allowed humans to save time, have more offsprings and survive.
Today, there's no energy savings. Today we bring the food to the animals, filtering millions of tons of nutrient filled grains through inefficient bodies that waste almost everything on keeping their temperature - their body warm. It is as far from nature as it gets.
You can't say there's something special about flesh that you need to survive, and there's nothing else that has it.
You like the luxury of eating meat, you like the taste, you like the texture. It is a luxurious activity that you allow yourself to have, ignoring the effects on the environment, ignoring the suffering (and yes there is no such thing as humane murder, rape or slaughter), doing it just for your pleasure. And it recently turned out to be almost an equivalent to cigarette smoking - so it's entirely irrational from a health perspective but that is the case for most of the luxuries.
That's fine with me but don't try to rationalize it, it is in its complete entirety - irrational.
It is also ironic that you pointed out a perfect example of speciesism (humans preferring one species over another) and you couldn't label yourself as a speciesist. It is also ironic how you pointed out the irrationality in other people, not seeing your own when it was right in front of you.
I'll take the way I've seen pigs and cows slaughtered when it comes time for me. Getting fed out of a nice trough of grain and never seeing the sledgehammer coming down is far more humane than getting your veins pumped full of nitrogen mustard and getting zapped with radiation for months.
Chemotherapy for terminal cancers should be considered cruel and unusual punishment.
Meat is tasty. It's a pain in the ass to raise and deal with those damn animals, and we wouldn't bother with them if they weren't good to eat or produced milk or eggs that are useful. The evolutionary forebears of the horse and the cow are extinct or well on the way there in the wild.
Maybe more people should have the experience of slaughtering a pig or steer, dressing it out, hanging it, then cutting it up. It's a great biology lesson, you'll learn which cuts of meat come from where, and you'll become very suspicious of supermarket meat (hint - real hamburger is not bright red like that).
"My life experience has given me a better understanding of what is happening, and what a mistake it is to believe there is anything called "humane" slaughter. Animals have families and feelings, and to think that kindness before killing them is an answer is totally wrong. ...
There is always fear in their eyes. They know exactly what is going to happen. So for anyone to claim there is such a thing as humane slaughter, well, that's the greatest oxymoron in the world." - Howard Lyman, former rancher
I also like this story:
I meet a woman in a club, buy her drinks, make her laugh, dance with her, she's having the time of her life, we go to my place, I make her favorite dish, she drinks the best wine, music is playing, she feels absolutely great, sitting on couch, watching her favorite movie, meanwhile, she's sipping that drink, that has date rape drug in it. She passes out, I rape her. Humanely. Next morning she feels a bit drowsy, she thinks it's the alcholol, she smiles, says she felt perfect although she can't remember the rest of the evening. I was gentle, she doesn't feel raped. John Doe, humane rapist
It is absolutely irrational to call slaughter humane. This rationalizing to make things morally right is the common mistake people make. It is a mistake in deduction and reasoning.
Some philosophers would probably say I'm a deontologist, and they would say that consequences of a deed make a deed wrong not that the deed itself is wrong - which is my opinion. Are there no consequences to massive animal slaughter and flesh consumption? Is waste of tax-payer's money a consequence big enough, maybe climate change, massive pollution?
Any rational process, any non-laughable branch of philosophy will say that slaughter is immoral and that there's nothing humane about it - and that humane is an adjective that cannot stand by it.
I have no problem with people eating meat, but people who rationalize it through appeal to nature, through skewing morals, that's what I have a problem with.
I can't parse a coherent position out of the rest of this, or find any real relation to what I said. I'll be charitable and assume you pasted in a response in the wrong place...
Your post shows the typical HN response where libertarianism comes into play. It's about as bad as discussions around age, sexism, or visa issues.
Anyone can bring a ballot measure forth, and well, in CA, people with horses are in general as full of their self importance as your blowhard post. Oh and people think horses are cute, so it passed.
Regarding meat substitution, late 70s/early 80s Jack In the Box was substituting Kangaroo for beef.
There was a large blow back.
Sometimes it is out of emotion, sometimes it is out of misrepresentation.
Much to my surprise, in 2012 the US was the top 3rd producer of horse meat trailing China and Kazakhstan.
It's illegal in some states to raise horses for human consumption. No federal funds are available to conduct necessary inspection of horse slaughterhouses, so the three major horse "slaughterhouses" just export the live horses to Canada or Mexico for slaughter before shipping the processed meet over to Europe.
This guy should send his apprentices and customers to Mongolia. Here whatever meat is cheapest reigns. All types are at multi-year lows because of a drought and now extra cold winter called a dzud. Depending on the preparation, I like horse meat a lot, and it gets a lot of play from people who prefer it to typically prepared mutton or beef.
In great country of Kazakhstan, horse gallop to own final supper! .. seriously though, see the proto Sino-Caucasian reconstructed phoneme I posted above.
Iceland still uses horses for meat. The restaurant that provides the food at my workplace usually incorporates it into the menu every other week or so.
Really horses are much more suited to our climate/landscape than other animals, so it makes sense.
I think abusing animals is wrong. But human interests are always more important than any animal interests. The government must exist solely to protect human interests.
>The government must exist solely to protect human interests.
I mostly agree with you about the meat consumption thing, but this?
Are you saying govt. shouldn't be in the business of wildlife conservation, prevention of animal cruelty or abuse, or preservation of natural habitats (beyond considering their impact on humanity) ?
Those things only matter in terms of their value to humanity. There are most probably an uncountable number of planets like Earth out there. The only thing special about this one is that it is our home.
That doesn't mean that we should seek to disrupt the environment. On the contrary, it is very precious to us for many reasons and should be protected. A lot of those reasons are very utilitarian. But it's also because we appreciate its beauty, its complexity, and our kinship with all life. But those are still all things that we value.
How we deal with lower life forms on our own planet is totally unrelated to how we would deal with intelligent life from another. Why would they be related? If you're worried that aliens would look down on us as inferior life forms and wipe us out, that's totally possible, though I'd say it's pretty unlikely that any aliens ever come to visit us anyway. If they do, and they're more powerful than us, our animal welfare laws are not going to do us any good.
That argument has been made countless times in history, with just as much conviction, but replacing human/animal with black/white, male/female, heterosexual/gay, Christian/other, etc.
Differences among humans are not analogous to the gap between us and animals. All human beings have equal moral worth. We clearly do not believe the same thing about animals. To make animals morally equal to human beings is completely incompatible with the reality of the world. It's fantastical thinking with potentially destructive consequences, if decisions are made that harm the interests of people in order to help animals.
Human is a label we gave to ourselves. Would you discriminate over homo erectus, homo habilis - would you call them non-human animals, would it be okay to use them for medical testing, maybe for food since their flesh doesn't have Neu5Gc?
The only reason why your statements are this speciesist is that no living ancestor of ours that was labeled a different species is alive today.
Otherwise you'd realize that species are a human construct, that there's no better/worse. Yes, that does mean that human as a fully moral being (morality comes from rationality) should try to minimize pain and suffering and destruction of life.
Animal holocaust is happening for thousands of years. Even the holocaust survivors have made comparisons and a lot of them have plant-based diets.
Same way humans were differentiated by using races - ranking us lower/higher better/worse than others, that's what people do with species.
If you find the theory of evolution a fact, then you wouldn't laugh at me. Any rational evolutionary biologist will agree that species are here to simplify the conversations, they cannot be used for ranking which species are better - they are also not the main theme of research.
Do you know how species are defined? Sane definition? - members of the same species can produce a fertile offspring. But there are hundreds if not thousand of exceptions where this happens even across the species boundary - the reason why it happens is that our labeling is in its core subjective and somewhat arbitrary, there's no dividng line/plane/svm-hyperplane.
In the parallel lines of time in evolution and natural selection we've been as long as all the living beings.
You wouldn't find homo erectus (neanderthalensis, habilis, rudolfensis, ergaster, floresiensis, even some australopithecae) attractive but you could procreate. There's a biological reason why you can't have children with a horse, it's not a species reason, it's not even ingrained in our species labeling as can be seen from the above definition.
What, you would rank the being as irrelevant (or less relevant) if you can't have children with it? Comedy of irrationality.
Go try finding your rationality and get back to us on that.
I made that comment because of your assertion that species is a human construct, not because you are saying that species shouldn't be ranked as better/worse. Species is a biological classification, it is the largest classification at which two members can create fertile offspring, which is why I mentioned breeding in my comment. Trying to separate biology and species doesn't make any sense to me as the grouping is a description based on that biological compatibility.
I don't even have an argument with you because you have a consistent view on the issue, unlike those that eat pigs but not cats or dogs. So we're actually mostly in agreement, the arbitrary classification that people are making with pigs and dogs being food or pets is silly.
And no, breeding compatibility does not decide my diet.
Edit: Your third and final paragraphs were added after I started writing my comment, which is why I didn't address them. I also don't understand your fourth paragraph.
Yeah, I'm adding paragraphs because I'm trying to anticipate the arguments people put forth to rationalize appeal to nature - and draw their moral (rational) conclusions from it. Especially when they don't know that nature is defined with subjective and somewhat arbitrary definitions that have extreme amounts of exceptions. Same thing is done with religion, where there are plenty of definitions but hundreds of exceptions because definitions are not precise enough, and can't be.
As my third paragraph states, there are enough exceptions to see that species isn't always that definition, and that it is somewhat arbitrary.
Fourth paragraph is also an additional information for those who want to rank horses as lesser beings because we are obviously capable of reigning the planet thus our evolutionary path is more worth - without noticing that the evolution and natural selection don't have a goal set in stone.
If you don't have an argument, then why laugh at me with that horse joke? It's entirely irrelevant and, given my following comment, incorrect.
Race is a social construct because there is no scientific definition of race and is not consistent between cultures or even in the same culture over time.
Species however has a scientific definition - "A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms where two individuals are capable of reproducing fertile offspring." Thus not a social construct, this is a well defined classification. We may reclassify species based on new information or because they evolved, but that doesn't mean its a social construct.
Reindeer steaks on the other hand, those are among the best steaks made out of any animal I've eaten. There the price comes from the fact that reindeer herds need hundreds if not thousands of square kilometres to roam freely. The good thing is that Finland has 123 000 sqkms of wilderness (roughly the size of Greece or Mississippi) officially dedicated for herding reindeer!