re: where some of this really starts
Actually in fact (while most likely not admitted into any statistical base) there are those who raise horses for meat. Since the family farmer has been under attack from various corners of the economic policies in especially the last nearly 30 years. Corporate farming is taking over, many have lost generational farms, in some areas it is like finding a living dinosaur to speak to and try to understand how they have suvived.
Many have turned to just that to survive somehow, just as puppy mills started their death march around the country on the heels of the economic collapse. Quite likely they were in existence in isolated form from greedy and morally distant individuals.
On the cultural front as it concerns horses when the changing cultural cataclysms have hit, the acceptance of eating horse has not been breeched, at least in the United States, and it is considered a reprenhensible thing to do. If you were starving, of course you would eat what you had to in order to survive. But if you look back throughout history, and I do not have any exact year as it happened slowly after the Renaissance, but one of the popes issued a decree against the eating of horses as it was common practice in the Roman Empire for fallen generals to be honored by the “cap” horse (the riderless horse with the boots turned backwards indicating a last look at his family), then after the ceremony they ate the horse.Also in pagan religious practices they drank the blood of the horse to give them power. So, in other words this practice has taken hold again in certain countries of Europe because of economically strangulating polices and outbreaks of diseases like mad cow.
The reason for the emotional disgust I would feel for even the idea of eating an animal such as the horse, dog & cat is because I am an inheritor, if you will, of a profoundly Christian outlook (although certainly the advanced Islamic Cultures, after their Renaissance felt the same), where the horse is our friend, our partner in war, work and in peace, and just as you would hopefully not eat your friend unless you were a cannibal or barbarian, or starving to death, as happened in Europe during WWI and WWII.
I remember stories from my German mother and things which I have read about the French underground during the war, in which they, in the midst of bombings and total devastation, would smuggle their pets with them. Heartbreaking stories that make me cry when I cuddle my pets and go to see the horses when I am the most distressed which is difficult now since I am bereft of any horse and only have 5 dogs living in a 900 square foot house. It makes me thank God that I am living in a country such as ours where we can disagree and discuss these matters on a public board.
What puzzles me the most about the Bryant Gumble show is that this has been going on for better than 30 years. Why suddenly is this such big news? Why not do an undercover investigation of the blue blood breeding stock farms where the babies are injected with steroids to make them bloom big and fat for the sales which is laying the basis for their early demise on a race track or galloping out in the field somewhere. It also does destroy their internal organs and makes them infertile if used as Dick Dutrow is doing with Big Brown and is so widely accepted that he has the confidence to announce it to the whole world. It seems like if Big Brown wins the Triple Crown that the belief will be once again ingrained and certainly will encourage those who think it is absolutely okay to inject horses with a steroid once a month for nothing other than keeping their appetite sharp and their attitude focused and aggressive. It also is totally insane to try and prove that Eight Belles did not have steroids in her systmem nowas it most likely happend when she was being prepped for the sales.
This is where the real criminal brainwashing begins when in the past if someone had admitted to that, they would have been banished with scorn from the community of great and good trainers and owners, probabaly still are, but you never hear that discussion in the daily drivel called the news media. Very few have the courage to come out and identify where the criminal indifference starts.
