In many parts of the American desert southwest, horses are a problem. Now, as a biologist who focused on field zoology, I'll be pedantic for a moment, and note that these are not "wild horses," they are "feral horses," as horses are not native to the region, or at least, they haven't been since around the middle of the last ice age. These are horses descended from horses brought from Europe.
Why does that matter? Because the feral horses in the southwest are messing up habitat that supports, among other critters, desert bighorn sheep and pronghorn antelope. The Bureau of Land Management has been trying to bring the numbers of these horses down, mostly by capture and auction. But a recent piece in the Washington Post (Yes, I know) raises another question, one that won't sit well with most Americans:
Why is it that Americans eat cows and pigs but not horses and dogs?
There’s only one reason: custom. We’re used to it, that’s all. There’s certainly nothing about horses and dogs that renders them inedible; people in other places happily eat them. There’s no moral argument that doesn’t also apply to the cows and the pigs. The only difference is that we think of cows and pigs as “food” and horses and dogs as “pets.” And not only do we not eat pets, but we also bristle at the very suggestion that they can be eaten.
Well, start bristling, because we should absolutely, positively, eat the wild horses that are wreaking havoc in the American West.
Well. Why not? There are social taboos against it in the Anglosphere, although horse and burro (donkey) meat was available in various places in the United Kingdom as late as the 1930s. In France, horse is routinely eaten. Horses are also eaten in China, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Mongolia, and yes, some of the horses auctioned off in the USA also go to slaughter for food, mostly in Mexico.
And horses, yes, can cause problems in some of these desert environments.
The horses are a problem and have been for decades. Many come under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which oversees some 25 million acres where the horses live. The goal, according to the BLM, is healthy horses and healthy rangeland. The problem, though, is that horse herds reproduce quickly (per the BLM, they can double in four or five years), and that’s bad for the land and the animals, as the land gets overgrazed and the horses struggle to find enough to eat.
In the past four years, the BLM has rounded up just over 46,000 horses. (It also does burros.) Less than half of them found adoptive homes, and the rest live out their lives in BLM holding facilities. Right now, there are about 60,000 horses in those facilities — and they cost about $100 million per year to maintain.
So why don't we Americans eat horses? It sure seems like plenty of people do.
Read More: New Mexico Donkey Racers Burro Into the Record Books
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I think a big part of the American taboo against eating horses comes from our uniquely American frontier culture, or at least, what's left of it. The settling of the American West would have been impossible without horses. There was good reason why horse thieves were hanged; having a horse could be a matter of life or death for people expanding into a wilderness, with no stores, no facilities, no roads, no civil authorities, no nothing, no kidding. With a horse and a rifle, a man could survive. Deprive him of either, and death would be the likely result.
Our development as a nation was tied to the horse. Many people's lives depended on the horse. We romanticized horses; they became a huge part of the mythos of America. That's not an animal that you look at and think, "Yum, horse steaks."
So, yes, feral horses are a problem in some places. But eating them isn't the answer. Americans just plain won't go for it.
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