Legalized Slaughter of Horses for Human Consumption?

[Maria]

Let me preface my next statements by saying is is no longer possible for me to become a vegetarian, although I understand the wish to do so. The list of foods I cannot eat is too wide and varied for me to survive without meat as the main protein source.

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It is difficult to eat an animal you have a bond with. When we first got a cow, I posted pictures of me grooming her with a big grin on my face. She grew to like me and I liked her. She gave us a couple of calves, but eventually grew lame and could not be saved. We sent her to the butcher along with our first two young beeves that were finally big enough.

We told the butchers to keep the meat separate so we could judge which cross was the best quality. So, we had distinct groups of the Dexter cow who was my friend, the Dexter/Lowline cross bull, and the Pineywoods/Lowline cross bull.

I would get a lump in my throat every time I pulled out a package of hamburger that I knew was from that cow. I didn't want to eat it. But once I did, it was perfectly good meat and it would have been a crime to waste it, since I knew it was all in my head. And it really was all in my head. After we finished determining the difference between the two crosses, we became less careful rummaging through the freezer looking for the particular cuts we wanted, and the catagories became hopelessly jumbled.

After that, when I pulled out a package of hamburger, it was just hamburger. There was a 50:50 chance that it was the Dexter cow, but it didn't bother me any more. It was just anonymous, delicious, lean grassfed meat.

We try really hard not to form a bond with any of the livestock any more. We made the mistake with the first two cows, and I dread the day Lizzie will have to be put down. Fortunately, she seems to be staying in excellent health, so hopefully we won't have to face that for many years. She's so sweet, though.

We made the same mistake with the first sheep we got. "Aina" was so friendly and sweet, that we loved feeding her grain out of our hand and the first lamb we had on the place made friends with our dog and got treated like a dog by us. "Curly" is his name and he's stayed a people loving sweety but now he's having trouble with his horns. One of them is growing closer and closer to his jaw and eye and soon we are going to have to amputate the horn or kill him.

Neither prospect is appealing.

And then there's the stupid chicken. I know better than to make a chicken a pet. But last year when I was trying to raise some replacement hens, foxes kept breaking into the pen and killing off the half grown hens. Soon there were only 3 left, and in order to try to save some, I'd bring them inside to a cage at night and carry them back out to their pen during the day. The foxes still eventually managed to carry off 2 of the chicks, and so I moved the sole survivor in with the adult birds. And soon I found that every time I let the chickens out of their pen for the day the little red pullet would follow me around. She'd fixated on me as a protective figure and that was that.

I didn't make her a pet. I certainly didn't want her to like me. But she did. So now she has a name She's "The Little Red Hen" (none of our other chickens are that color) and she'll probably stay with us until she dies of old age. She still follows me around some.

We don't name the livestock we aren't using for breeding. We refer to them by their mother's first initial and the year they are born. We are going to off "S10" in a couple of days. "L10" will be sometime after that when the weather is mild.

"K10"...... well, "K10" used to be first on my list to "off", simply because she was so freaking paranoid she'd go over a fence rather than be herded where we want her to go. She's never had anything bad happen to her, but she doesn't trust people--not for a minute. Her comfort zone used to be about 50 feet away, when all our other cattle (except Lizzie) is about 3 feet away. But I noticed during the summer when grass was so scarce and we were rationing hay that "K10" stayed relatively beefy compared to her half siblings. That's a trait we want! Plus, her attitude changed a bit.

Now, she follows people. When someone is out in the pasture, she doesn't take her eye off you for a minute, and comes as close as she dares which is currently about 10 feet. And watches you. Constantly. She's the first cow to notice when you approach and the last to watch you leave.

We finally decided this behaviour was vastly amusing and decided to keep her. So, she's been given a name: "You've Been Spotted!" or, of course "Spotted" for short. This name is kinda sily since two of our older cows are spotted and one of this year's calves.... but if you know what it's short for, it makes sense.
Yesterday when I went out to fill the water tank, she was keeping an eye on me and was very close. Maybe 7 feet away. It made me grin, and then for the first time I ducked behind a piece of machinery and she couldn't see me. I waited for a moment- and she first stepped one way, but couldn't see me. And then she started to step the other way, but I stood up and she really jumped!

I know I shouldn't.... but I think I may just have to play hide and seek with this cow. She's got so much personality- I don't think I'll be able to resist.

Some day, though, she'll have to be put down for some reason or another. And when that day comes, we will not waste the meat, even though it will be hard because she's so much more *aware* than the others. It makes her seem more sentient.

I have to eat meat to stay healthy. If it came down to eating horses, it would be much, much easier to kill and eat one that is not a friend than one that is... but if you have to eat a friend, if you can dilute or eliminate the effect by making it indistinguishable from non-friend meat.

[Inanna]

Horses are being slaughtered every day - for pet food. If they were being slaughtered for human food, it is POSSIBLE they would be treated better.

No way. Look at how we treat our chickens, turkeys and how we kill cows.

I am with you Anthy - am gonna have to switch soon - which is easy because I hardly ever eat meat, but still. I was vegetarian for 5 years back in India, and found it very difficult to maintain when doing my PhD. Its much easier in NY.

Jonathan Safran Foer (in Eating Animals) makes a valid point that converting all the euthanised dogs and cats to pet food would be a "logical" thing.

[Nin]

I do eat horse. So do both of my sons who are often making fun of the girls in their class in that regard.

I have so little cultural inhibition that I would be ready to eat almost any animal, including dog or cat or snake if I lived in a different environnement. The only limit for me is endangered species or personal disgust like with insects.

But then, I'd also be ready to slaughter an animal myself in the abstract (I did so with fish), I'd be ready to give my very own body to be made pet food - I don't care to be buried or anything. I eat very little meat when I am by myself, and mostly white meat, but this for personal taste and without any conviction. Animal welfare can make me very, very angry. The famous or infamous Brigitte Bardot is a notorious racist. I can also get very ennoyed by people who humanize their pets or care more (and better!) for their pets than for their kids.

By conviction, I also eat heart, liver etc, the less noble parts. If you kill an animal, it should make the most food possible - but I say so for ecological and not at all for ethical or sentimental reasons.

I often say about myself that I have a butcher's soul.

I think it is very dangerous to consider eating animals morally inferior. Mostly I consider behaviour which makes peole feel rightful dangerous anyway. As surely most know, Hitler was a vegetarian. It does not say a lot about people how they treat their pets. You can be very nice with your dog but cruel to your neighbours - humans are so difficult after all.

[Frelga]

Well, here is a link:

http://www.thatmutt.com/2009/01/25/is-t ... -dog-food/

From this, it seems that, while horses aren't being slaughtered in the US, they are still being sent elsewhere to be slaughtered. Which I'm not sure is preferable by any standards.

I have to say, the level of discourse in the comments is truly impressive.

[Maria]

Jonathan Safran Foer (in Eating Animals) makes a valid point that converting all the euthanised dogs and cats to pet food would be a "logical" thing.

They already do that. A book I read about pet food production shows that live pets are becoming resistant to the euthanasia drug that is used to kill pets at shelters. This is because the euthanized pets are used to make pet food, and the drug carries over.

If anyone wants to make better use of euthanized pet meat, they'd need to kill them some other way. And handle the carcasses better. What they do now is just euthanize them and store them for pickup by the renderers. Whole carcasses are dumped into a big vat, including hair and even flea collars and boiled down. The fat is removed and sold as "animal fat" or several other names and added to pet food products. Also included are road kills and animals that die for other reasons, so the quantity of euthanasia drug involved is quite variable.

Meat handling is a very precise process, if you want a good product. You can't just kill something and throw it in a cooler to wait and let someone else pick it up and expect anything but a nasty product.

edit: Frelga, the further an animal is transported for slaughter, the more fear and stress is involved. That's why we are butchering our cattle at home this year.

[Griffon64]

Maria - do you get a butcher over to process your cattle, or do you do it yourself? I seem to recall that you do process your own chickens since I remember you talking about a mechanical ... hmmm, plucker? Feather remover? I don't know the word.

Like Nin, I am a little wary of morality being assigned to the consumption of animal products.

[Lalaith]

Like Nin, I am a little wary of morality being assigned to the consumption of animal products.

Was anyone doing that here? If so, I must have missed it.

[Maria]

Griffy, we've done our own deer for years and last year started with sheep. This year we are going to try one of the young bulls, and he's probably going to weigh 3 times more than the biggest deer we've ever taken.

The size difference alone makes it a daunting prospect, but our cattle are small breeds, so it's not impossible to do at home. We spent months this year constructing a walk in cooler so we can hang and age the meat at controlled temps for two weeks. That's probably the hardest part right there. Our trial run was with the deer my husband got a few weeks ago, and it worked perfectly.

If we didn't have a tractor with a front loader to do the heaving lifting, it would be much harder to handle everything- but we do, so it shouldn't be bad. We usually hang deer whole, but we'll have to split the beef carcass down the middle just to get the weight of each half down to a managable level.

We also bought a butcher's band saw for the occasion. This will allow us to cut the various steaks with bones in, rather than deboning everything like we do for deer. T-Bone steaks........

So, anyway, meat production is turning into a major hobby for us nowadays. Which is just as well because as a prediabetic, my husband can't eat many carbs and meat by default is a large part of my diet. (I say by default because there isn't much left after the humungous list of things I can't eat!)

[Griffon64]

Like Nin, I am a little wary of morality being assigned to the consumption of animal products.

Was anyone doing that here? If so, I must have missed it.

No. Did I say anyone was? If I did, I must have missed it.

It was just a comment, based on what Nin said and on some of the thoughts that have been sloshing around in my head on this topic, and I just wanted to wave over in her direction by saying that I share that thought.

The whole vegetarian thing can be ( doesn't have to be ) a sensitive topic, and decisions around this is most likely to be quite personal. I know several vegetarians who are not judgmental about their reasons for not eating meat, and I have no problem ( or beef, as the case may be! ) with them.

Actually, I don't know any vegetarians who are judgmental, and that's just as well.

*Dusts off the ol' "Unless specifically directed at someone, comments in this post are not, in fact, specifically directed at anyone" sign and props it up at bottom of post.* I should just add that to my signature.




Maria - that's interesting! I'm toying off and on with the idea of keeping chickens for meat and eggs, but I find the meat side of the process daunting because I'm not familiar with it. ( We're zoned for animals, but it is really a horse property, not a farming kind of property, we're in a residential neighborhood, so I can't actually slaughter chickens here if I wanted to I'm sure! ) As a kid I've watched my share of sheep being processed, but I've never done anything of the sort myself.

[Lalaith]

I wasn't being snarky, Griffy. It's just that you mentioned it and Nin mentioned it. So then I wondered, "Did someone misunderstand something I said? Or did I miss someone actually saying something to that effect?"

FWIW, I agree with you both. I fully realize my hypocrisy. I've been giving it some thought, though, and I'd like to work to reduce that amount of hypocrisy. Eliminating it altogether would be good, too.

[Frelga]

Curiously, my city allows keeping chickens (but not roosters), goats and small pigs. But they said they can't ban slaughter of the animals, because of freedom of religion issues. Apparently, ritual slaughter is an accepted religious practice, and the city doesn't want to be stuck regulating it.

[Griffon64]

Roosters have the whole noise thing going on, but many cities allow keeping a few hens, with regulations on how close the coop may be to anybody's bedroom window, or house in general.

Interesting about the slaughter of the animals, though! That made me look up the zoning regulations for my residential zone, and I can slaughter my own animals, I just may not do it commercially:

A. All permitted uses and regulations in the RS zone shall be the same as the R-1 zone, except that the following additional uses are permitted:

1. Breeding, hatching, raising and keeping of poultry, fowl, rabbits, chinchillas, Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, fish, frogs and bees for the domestic use of the resident/occupant of the lot.

2. Keeping of cattle, sheep, goats, horses, mules and burros in a ratio not exceeding one adult animal of the foregoing for each one-quarter acre of lot area.

B. The keeping of such fowl and animals shall conform to all other provisions of law governing same.

C. No fowl or animals, nor any pen, coop, stable, corral or other structure or enclosure housing livestock or poultry shall be kept or maintained within fifty feet of any dwelling or other building used for human habitation; nor within one hundred feet of the front lot line of the lot upon which such animal or structure is located; nor within ten feet of the street side of a corner lot; nor within one hundred feet of any public park, school, hospital, or similar institution.

D. There shall be no raising, killing or dressing of any such animals or poultry for commercial purposes. (Ord. 3465 § 1, 1992; Ord. 2491 § 1, 1984; Ord. 2698 § 1, 1982; prior code § 17.14.010)

This is only possible because we're in a zoned for animal area. Standard single home residences may not keep any of the above animals, including chickens.

[Maria]

If you only want to kill a few birds, Griffy, you don't need a feather plucker machine. We bought that gizmo before we got cattle and I thought we'd be raising hundreds of chickens and turkeys per year to meet our meat requirements. Now it seems a collossal waste of money, since we only do a few chickens per year. Turkeys and chickens are too easily gotten by predators and it's much easier to raise large herbivores. (Well, easier to keep them alive, anyway!) Ah, well. Live and learn.

If you scald chickens correctly, it's not hard to pluck them by hand. I'm tempted to do that next time we cull some old hens, just because the plucker machine is such a pain to clean up!

Edit: I've got a book about raising chickens you can have if you want.

[Frelga]

Griffy, I see your ordinance does not prohibit killing animals on the property for personal use. I wonder if it's for the same reason.

[Nin]

Like Nin, I am a little wary of morality being assigned to the consumption of animal products.

Was anyone doing that here? If so, I must have missed it.

Not here - and my comment was not at all aimed at this thread but it is often done.

[Cenedril_Gildinaur]

I have no problem with people eating horses. I don't get our cultural hangup about it. From my point of view, if an animal has eyes on the side of its head then it is prey.

But yes, you can't get attached to your food. We raised goats when I was a kid, and we slaughtered one of the young bucks for food.

I was having problems eating it, and I was trying to not think about the identity of the meat. So my siblings insisted on calling the meat by its living name just to distress me even more. "Mmmm, Apollo."

I couldn't eat anything that night, and my parents never understood why I was so upset, and never saw that my siblings did anything wrong.

[Maria]

For that reason my parents always named their meat cattle by names like, "Ribeye" or "Sir Loin".

I never really liked that practice, though, which is why we are going with letter/number designations.

It still doesn't help when you have to eat one you didn't plan on, like "Rosy".

[anthriel]

Okay. You guys are all responsible for poor Mr. anth not getting a full night's sleep last night... apparently I woke him up last night, thrashing around, moaning "NO! NO!!" I don't remember much of the dream, except a man in a beret was chasing both my horses around with a huge knife, yelling "they are just meat, after all!" I couldn't run, couldn't move, couldn't get to them in time to protect them, and the look of sheer terror on Kolby's face... oy. OY!!

Like Nin, I am a little wary of morality being assigned to the consumption of animal products.

Was anyone doing that here? If so, I must have missed it.

No. Did I say anyone was? If I did, I must have missed it.

No, I'm glad Lali asked that question, and I'm glad that you described what you (and, I assume, Nin) were referring to. I also wondered if it was something in the thread, and wondered if my comments about considering being a vegetarian had been misconstrued.

I actually hadn't considered that vegetarians as a group might be thought to be judgmental about those who do choose to eat meat... a pretty logical thing for them to do, I guess, I just haven't known any vegetarians who judge others for not being vegetarians. Mostly, they seems a little apologetic, actually (at least the ones I know), saying stuff like "it just wasn't right for me", or somesuch.

I guess I kind of equate it to the drinking thing. I have not been much of a drinker for the last few years, but if I say something like that to people who do drink, they always think I'm being judgmental, somehow. NO, I'm fine with people drinking. I just don't, much, anymore.

I'm sure there are judgmental vegetarians out there, as well as people who are judgmental OF vegetarians. Neither, in my book, is okay.

[Griffon64]

I think people easily take anything of the "I don't do that" vein to be judgmental, and I think at least some of the blame for that touchiness lies with the fact that probably all of us have, at some point, encountered someone who was judgmental as they said that they didn't do a certain thing, even if it was back in primary school when the resident little wasp said that she didn't sleep with her teddy anymore.

Maybe?

I don't really know.

Vegetarianism is a personal choice and I feel it should remain that way.

My one vegetarian friend will happily cook fabulous meat dishes for her friends, and she'd even scoop some of the sauce from, say, a chicken casserole, over her rice. But she doesn't eat the meat itself. I haven't really talked to her about why she doesn't eat meat, but I do know she used to eat meat. Another vegetarian I worked with eats fish, but not other meat - and has also said "I don't eat anything with a face", to which I didn't say "So what do you call the area at the front of the fish, then?" though I wanted to.

I'm not sure why vegetarianism often feels judgmental to meat eaters. Maybe it is because there are a few vocal ones who do act judgmental and then it is the ol' broad brush thing? Maybe it is because many meat eaters, if they stop to think about it, doesn't think that they'd be able to kill an animal for food, and they feel a bit defensive about it? I'm sure there are many, many reasons.

Uhm, I was going to write more, but I have to go run errands. So if the post is a little weird, blame time constraints.

[SirDennis]

I actually hadn't considered that vegetarians as a group might be thought to be judgmental about those who do choose to eat meat... a pretty logical thing for them to do, I guess, I just haven't known any vegetarians who judge others for not being vegetarians. Mostly, they seems a little apologetic, actually (at least the ones I know), saying stuff like "it just wasn't right for me", or somesuch.

Well there's "Todd the Vegan" from Scott Pilgrim vs The World: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqqGZBRBLcM (and to see what happens next: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLpCZ8g5 ... ure=relmfu ) * Mild language warning for both clips * "You once were a V-gon but now you will be gone." "V-gon?"