Horse slaughter

Horse slaughter is the practice of horses to produce meat for consumption.

Human beings have consumed horse meat since the earliest days of human history: the oldest known cave art, the thirty-thousand-year-old paintings in the Chauvet Cave of modern France, show horses prominently alongside other wild animals hunted by humans. The later domestication of the horse is widely held to have been initiated for the purposes of raising horses for slaughter for human consumption.

In modern times, horse slaughter has become controversial in some parts of the world, based on a various of concerns: e.g. whether horses are or can be managed humanely in industrial-style slaughter; whether horses not purpose-raised for consumption are likely to yield safe meat; whether it is appropriate to consume a creature that has become a companion animal.

In most countries where horses are slaughtered for food, they are processed in industrial abattoirs in a similar fashion to cattle.

Typically, a penetrating captive bolt gun or gunshot is used to render the animal unconscious. The blow/shot is intended to either kill the horse instantly or stun it, with exsanguination (bleeding out) being used immediately after to ensure death. Saleable meat is removed from the carcass, with the remains rendered for other commercial uses.

Horse welfare advocates have raised concerns that the particular physiology of the horse cranium means that neither the penetrating captive bolt gun nor gunshots are reliable means of ensuring that a horse is in fact killed or stunned and that the animal is more likely to be only paralyzed. Unless properly checked for vital signs, the horse may remain conscious and experience pain during skinning and butchering during the final phase of the slaughter process.

Horse meat traditionally was a source of meat during times of desperation, such as early 20th-century World Wars (see war horse). Before the advent of motorized warfare, campaigns usually resulted in many tens of thousands of equine deaths and both troops and civilians ate the carcasses, since troop logistics were often unreliable. Troops of Napoleon Bonaparte' s Grande Armée killed almost all of their horses while retreating from Moscow in order to feed themselves.

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