Italy proposes horse meat ban

Full disclosure - I've eaten raw horse meat. It happened at one of those conveyor belt sushi restaurants in Japan, before I understood the Kanji character for 'horse'. I thought it was fish until I started chewing it, when I realised that it was definitely a four-legged land animal. That was the last time, and I don't really fancy trying it again.

That said, I can't help but feel a little ambivalent about the horse meat ban proposed by the ruling coalition in Italy's national government. I've never been convinced by the arguments of anyone claiming that one kind of meat is acceptable while another is not. Italian politician Francesca Martini claims that 'the dignity of horses should be respected'. Presumably this means that animals that she enjoys eating have no dignity. Meanwhile, Luca Zaia, quickly proving himself to be a hysterical lunatic of the first order, grants himself the philosophical authority to proclaim that horses should be 'considered just like cats and dogs.' I don't have any desire whatsoever to consume a cat or dog, but again, have never found the moral arguments against it - at least when coming from carnivores - to be persuasive. The appalling treatment of many animals reared for meat, on the other hand, is certainly worth fighting against.

Surely the dignity of animals should be determined by how they are treated in life, not what happens to them after death? In justifying his McItaly endorsement, Luca Zaia has no problem in referring to cows as 'units' for Italian farmers to profit from. I understand that this is the economic logic of agriculture, but it's deeply hypocritical to then pontificate about protecting another species' special humanistic qualities. What I think this reflects is the emotional disconnection from animals that industrial agriculture has produced. The controversy over horse meat essentially reveals that some people don't want to eat animals with which they think it's capable of developing an emotional bond. Fair enough. But this is an easy position to take when all your animal foods are raised, slaughtered, butchered and packaged by somebody else. In those conditions it's easy to forget about 'dignity'.

For what it's worth, I like horses and would rather they weren't killed for meat. But I'm a carnivore and one man's horse meat is another's filet mignon, so I can't logically condemn consumers of any other species. If consumption of horse meat declines I would like to see that happen through lack of demand, not politicians' decrees.