Horse Meat Sure Is Good Eatin'!

Looking through news articles a couple of weeks ago, I found this story about the U.S. House of Representatives voting to disallow the slaughter of horses for meat.

This reminded me of something, once again from my days with Delta Airlines.

When I have told people about this over the years, some were intrigued, some were astonished/outraged, and some simply thought I was lying.

Back in the mid-late 80's, when I was working as a ramp rat baggage handler for Delta at DFW airport, we handled the ground operations for what was then British Caledonian. It was a UK based international airline that was eventually bought by British Airways.

Several days per week, when their DC-10 was at the gate, two refrigerated 18 wheelers would pull up behind the aircraft.

Each truck's trailer was filled, front to back, with pallets of big boxes.

These boxes where sides of horse meat, raised and butchered in the U.S. just as cattle are for beef, and sent to England for distribution and human consumption all over Europe.

I didn't believe it myself when I was first told, but one day I had a few minutes to spare and rode a tug (one of those little tractor thingies that pulls baggage carts) down to talk with some friends working the flight one day. The boxes were marked as horse meat, and the manifest said so as well.

So, on this one flight, two or three times a week, tons of horse meat were being shipped to England. They were butchered in Fort Worth and brought over for the flights. So, this was really fresh horse meat.

I have never seen horse meat served in an American restaurant, though it may be somewhere, and I've never been out of the States, but I gather that folks all over the world eat it just as we do beef here.

It sounds wierd to an American, eating horse, but after thinking about it, what's the difference?

I've eaten turtle and deer meat, so if a horse is raised and fattened like a cow, it probably wouldn't taste much different than grain fed beef. Alligator is found in many restaurants down here in Florida.

This was just one of those things that, when this story broke, reminded me of something I haven't thought of in years.

But if it surprised any of you that there were horses being raised, slaughtered, and shipped overseas, I can personally attest that it has been going on for many years.

I guess that for Americans, a horse is one of those animals we can't mentally deal with eating.