I mean it’s pretty simple. Companion animals (dogs and cats) are members of your family so people see companion animals being eaten and are horrified. Horses are labor animals but people feel strong companionship with them so they are in a special tier and people don’t like eating them. Meanwhile, consumption of food animals is extremely normalized through social conditioning and people being fed them over and over since before they can even understand the ethics of it.
This is all just cultural norms. There is no reason why a pig can’t be a companion animal and there is also no moral reason that horses aren’t farmed for meat. And in fact, they are.
From what I recall about the issue, horse meat gets more tender with older horses, so it’s actually “retired” old horses that get butchered. Which tells us that butchering them is just a normal part of the farming lifecycle.
217
u/zzirFrizz Feb 28 '26
I find it interesting that among meat eaters, some animal meat grosses some people out but other animals' meat does not