Hippophagy

Figure depicting the horse carcass in a butcher shop, made during the siege of Paris by Prussian troops in 1870.

Hippophagy - the practice of regular and (or) predominant use of horse meat in food. Hippophagy is known since prehistoric times ^[1] and was practiced in antiquity by many peoples of Eurasia, being often associated with pagan rituals, which prompted the Catholic Church during the European Middle Ages to ban it. The practice of eating horse meat was common during periods of food shortages, as well as among nomadic peoples such as the Mongols. Widely spread in France at the end of the 19th century, it abruptly disappeared in the 1960s. The United States outlawed hippophagia in several states. The scandals associated with the risk of being infected with trichinosis by using horse meat, “shocking images” of animals sent to the slaughter, and continuing disputes about the symbolic and historical place of a horse in human civilization are considered to be the causes of a negative attitude to the use of horse meat in some Western countries. In the countries of Central and South America, Scandinavia, Central and East Asia, hippophagy can be considered a tradition, unlike the Anglo-Saxon countries, the culture of which is not peculiar to it. Refusal to eat horse meat can be caused by cultural or religious reasons. Nowadays, hippophagia is increasing in the world, and 4,700,000 horses are slaughtered each year to meet the needs of the eight largest consumer countries. In January 2013, a major scandal broke out in Europe Associated with the replacement of horse meat with beef in some meat products.

Horses consumed later for food are often former participants of any equestrian events, which makes their resale for slaughter more interesting. Foals less than eighteen months of age and racehorses showing poor results can also be killed for meat. Harvested horse meat can also be made for further processing it into animal feed. Hippophagia has supporters who justify it for economic reasons, as well as among some scientists in the field of nutrition, who believe that this meat has nutritional properties. The main opponents of eating horse meat are the animal protection associations, which condemn the conditions of delivery for slaughter and slaughter of horses.

In the modern Western media, information campaigns have been launched both on preserving and banning hippophagy. Horses are often used by a person in a given activity without assuming its further content, when it can no longer work, and without proper ethics. The social role of the horse in some countries has changed significantly in recent years, and at present it is considered by some to be close to domestic animals. Alternatives to hippophagy include keeping animals up to natural death, euthanasia and cremation of corpses.