As I watched a few minutes of this past weekend's Breeder's Cup, I couldn't help but think, "Why don't we eat these giant, muscular mammals?"  Horses are essentially equal to cows in both size and dietary requirements, and beef is one of America's favorite foods.  As usual, Wikipedia has lots of information about this.  Also as usual, the internet has an offensive yet funny cartoon about it. 

One common argument against eating horses is that they're like pets, and we have problems with consuming the flesh of dead pets.  My counterargument is this:  Pets are only pets in America.  In every other country on earth, dogs are equivalent to rats and are hated as such.  And when people are hungry enough, they'll eat anything.  Personally, my aversion to eating pets consists of two parts:  (1) Dogs and cats eat things like bugs, poop, and other inedible objects, and I don't like my meal being furnished by those types of things; and (2) many pets, especially smaller ones, really aren't worth the trouble of butchering because they offer so little meat.  We have two pets rabbits, and if you decided to come into my house to kill them and eat them (provided you killed me first, because I will mess you up if you touch my rabbits), you'd be sorely disappointed to find yourself with less than 5 lbs of dead animal, and after gutting and deboning, I doubt you'd even have enough meat for a single meal.  (Plus you'd have my ghost on your hands, and I would mess you up.)  Horses, on the other hand, have the benefit of being vegetarians and being gigantic, so they could easily provide a lot of meat without being gross. 

[Sidenote:  Yes, I realize pigs are omnivores too, and they regularly eat garbage and rotting food and things like that.  But the cool thing about food processing is that you can make the final product completely separate from the original animal.  This is especially true of larger animals, where you're served a chunk of meat instead of a whole body part like a leg or a wing.  And of course, there's always ground meat, which is the farthest you can get from the original product.]

Another argument against eating horses is that the slaughter process is inhumane, or something to that effect.  While that's a legitimate concern, it can't really be used in an argument unless you're a vegetarian, since pretty much all food animals are raised and killed inhumanely (except the locally-raised happy cows and chickens Wendy buys from a nearby farm).  You know what's also inhumane concerning horses?  Forcing them to run around a muddy track with a little person on their back who insists on whipping them mercilessly all so some rich people can bet on them and become richer. 

A final argument against eating horses is that some religions forbid it.  Thankfully, I subscribe to the one religion that's pretty lenient about this, Christianity, which says, "All food is clean." 

My opinion:  We should eat horses. #food