• Varesti@lemmy.zip
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    18 days ago

    Obviously I don’t want it to be tainted, but I never really saw the problem with eating a horse.

    • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mlOP
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      18 days ago

      I will say, it is definitely arbitrary why people have that feeling towards horses and not cows, pigs, sheep, etc. who are just as intelligent and worth our consideration

      I think lot of it has to do with the fact that more people have grown up seeing how kind and sweet other horses are and it’s not as socially common to eat them in the US. Because of all that people are able to see them as morally valuable and killing them as wrong

      Whereas for other farm animals, people have grown up seeing their killing normalized and since it’s normal it’s not questioned. If you come from Europe or elsewhere where horse meat is more common, then you’ll have also seen horse in the same way as other farm animals where their killing is a normalized thing

      • tempest@lemmy.ca
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        18 days ago

        Horses are pets now more than anything else. You can eat dogs too but it makes people squeamish

        • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mlOP
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          18 days ago

          Can in the sense that some places in the world do that (increasingly less often), but these social norms are somewhat codified into US law. In the US dog and cat meat are illegal. It’s illegal to kill horses for meat in the US, but not illegal to ship them abroad to be killed for horse meat. (This loophole is being exploited actively by this administration to round up feral horses to be killed)

          Pigs too are often pets for an increasing number of people. The distinction of able to be seen as a pet vs not is a line that is constantly moving, and who gets moral consideration is line that tends to shift with it