O.K., so there’s this scandal about Tesco selling horse meat and labeling it as beef, and everybody is all like ewwww, gross.
Sure, it’s fraud, false advertising and all that, definitely a step over the line in that direction. I’ve no objection to exaggeration, and maybe a slightly misleading picture, but selling horse and calling it beef is a flat out lie, a big pork pie as they say and come to think of it, you have to wonder what’s in all those English meat pies now.
Uh-Oh, Tesco
It’s not any kind of a health risk, though, or anything like that. Horse is good meat. Horse tastes just fine.
I think the objection is mostly cultural. People think of horses and they think of lovable animals with big, soulful eyes who we ride on, but cows are also lovable animals with big, soulful eyes and we could ride on them if we wanted to. But, nooooo….
So, it’s a pretty much totally illogical cultural objection. Still, there’s the lying.
That’s the part that I don’t understand. Why lie? If horsemeat is cheaper than beef, then you market it as horse, the cheaper meat. For every customer who refuses to buy it, there would be others who would try it, either because it is something they are not used to it, or they know it and like it and are glad to be afforded that option, or because, as I stated above, it’s the cheaper meat.
People got tricked into eating something they didn’t choose to eat. Even if they couldn’t tell the difference, that’s out of line. So, I hope Tesco loses a lot of money over this and has to change their ways.
But if you’re going to eat a cow, there’s no logical moral objection to eating horse. Horse tastes good.
www.gurukalehuru.com 
There’s a bit more to it than that though, isn’t there Will? Humans have a relationship with horses in a way that we just don’t, with cows. Horses have ploughed our fields, drawn our carriages,carts and brewery drays for millenia. They have carried men into battle.They are aesthetically beautiful in a way that cows are not, a glorious, powerful noble, courageous beast that has been an integral part of humanity’s path from the cave to the space age. From a British perspective I say we just don’t eat our friends. I can’t explain why the French don’t see it that way, but it’s the same reason that eating dogs is abhorrent to us Brits.
To test your argument that if you eat cows there is no logical reason not to eat horses, let’s extrapolate to it’s conclusion, in which case there is no logical reason that dead humans aren’t recycled to reclaim the protein.
However, It’s just plain wrong to eat your friends. Unless possibly surviving a plane crash in the Andes of course.