Donkey meat for sale on Amazon: is a donkey a horse in California?

 Is a donkey a horse in California, where state law prohibits the sale of horse meat for human consumption. In particular, the 1998 law states:

"This measure prohibits both the slaughter of horses for human consumption and the sale of horsemeat for human consumption in California. In addition, horses could not be sent out of California for slaughter in other states or countries for human consumption. Under the measure horses include any horse, pony, burro, or mule."

I'm neither a lawyer nor a linguist, but, for what it's worth, "burro" is the Spanish word for donkey.

Wired has the story:

Amazon Has a Donkey Meat Problem. "The online retailer sells products meant for human consumption that contain donkey meat. A new lawsuit claims that’s illegal in California."

"A legal complaint filed in California last week by the law firm Evans & Page on behalf of the Center for Contemporary Equine Studies, a nonprofit, claims Amazon’s continued sale of these donkey-based products is more than distasteful—it may be illegal.  

"The Center alleges that Amazon’s distribution and sale of ejiao violates an obscure California animal welfare law called the Prohibition of Horse Slaughter and Sale of Horsemeat for Human Consumption Act. The 1998 ballot initiative, known at the time of its passage as Proposition Six, makes the sale of horsemeat for human consumption a crime on the grounds that horses, like dogs and cats, are not food animals and deserve similar protections. The Center is arguing that, under the statute, horsemeat is defined to mean any part of any equine, including donkeys. 

"For Frank Rothschild, director of the Center for Contemporary Equine Studies, the law is clear: Donkeys are equines, and the sale of ejiao for human consumption in California is illegal. “We are a scientific organization and not in the business of national advocacy. We want the defendants to stop selling ejiao because it’s illegal,” he says. “That’s the law.”

"Bruce Wagman, an attorney unaffiliated with the complaint who has practiced animal law in California for 30 years, says that while the center presents a reasonable argument, it’s unclear whether a judge would agree because the law’s wording leaves room for interpretation. “Horsemeat is not really defined in the text of the relevant statute,” he says. “But the spirit of Proposition Six is absolutely to prevent equines, including donkeys, from being slaughtered for people to consume. Period.”

"The complaint demands that Amazon stop selling ejiao immediately. If a judge ultimately finds Amazon in violation of the law, the state of California could fine Amazon for each sale. This type of regulatory pressure is not unprecedented. In 2018, prosecutors in three California counties accused Amazon of violating a 2004 state law banning sales of foie gras. In a settlement, Amazon agreed not to sell the fatty goose liver in California and paid $100,000 in civil penalties. "

HT: Jacob Leshno

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My other posts on consumption of horse meat, and foie gras.

Why Don’t Americans Eat Horse?

From Eater.com, a long interesting summary of
Why Don’t Americans Eat Horse?
The red meat is common in many cultures, but rarely makes it on menus in the U.S. by Tim Forster

"Killing horses isn’t technically banned in the U.S.; variations on an outright horse slaughter ban have surfaced but floundered in Congress several times since 2006. But appropriations committees did successfully ban funding to the USDA to inspect horse meat in 2007 — and if there’s no money for inspections, there’s no guarantee of safety, therefore it can’t be sold. In the words of a USDA spokesperson, “If there is no mark of inspection, then horse meat is not allowed to move in our national commerce.” This spelled the end for America’s three horse-slaughter facilities, closed a decade ago. (Their products had primarily been sent overseas.)"

He makes the cultural argument (cowboys tamed the West), but I'm not convinced...

Wild (and abandoned) horses are starving, because we love them too much

Chris Stewart, a horse-loving Republican congressman from Utah, writes in the NY Times:

The Hard Truth About the West’s Wild Horse Problem

"The federal government’s Wild Horse and Burro Program is broken, leaving thousands of animals to starve. The Bureau of Land Management says that the nearly 27 million acres it manages for wild horses and burros can sustain only about 27,000 animals. This year, the bureau estimates that there were more than 72,000 wild horses on the land, almost 50,000 too many and all fighting to survive.
...
"This isn’t just a horse management disaster, it’s a financial disaster too. In addition to the 72,000 horses it oversees on the range, the B.L.M. keeps about 45,000 horses that it has removed from the wild in corrals, off-range pastures and in sanctuaries. Over their lifetime, these horses will cost taxpayers roughly $1 billion overall, according to the B.L.M. That’s $1 billion we could otherwise spend on defense, education, job training or any other worthy cause.
...
"the bulk of the blame lies with shortsighted decision-making by misinformed but well-meaning members of Congress.

"Congress had once supported laws that allowed for proper management of these animals. Horses in excess of what the land could sustain were to be captured, put up for adoption, sold without restriction — including to slaughterhouses, which the B.L.M. does not do as a matter of policy — and as a last resort, humanely euthanized. The program wasn’t perfect, but the B.L.M. was able to keep the herds’ numbers in check while ensuring that the ranges were viable and healthy year after year.

"But since 2010, Congress has used annual appropriations acts to significantly restrict the ability of the B.L.M. to sell or euthanize horses. "
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This is clearly not the situation intended by those who put in place the laws and regulations that prevent wild horse populations from being managed.  Maybe it's time to eat horsemeat, for the sake of the horses?  Not likely soon in the U.S.: see my previous posts on that...

House Panel Lifts Ban on Slaughtering Horses for Meat (December update: false alarm...)

Hot news off the AP wire on one of my favorite examples of a US-centric repugnant transaction. Here it is from the NY Times:

House Panel Lifts Ban on Slaughtering Horses for Meat

"A House panel has voted to lift a ban on slaughtering horses at meat processing plants.

The move by the House Appropriations Committee would reverse a horse slaughter ban that was contained in a huge catchall spending bill signed into law by President Trump in early May.

A move to renew the slaughter ban, pushed by California Democrat Lucille Roybal-Allard, was defeated by a 27-25 vote.

The Horse slaughter ban has mostly been in force for more than a decade. The ban is enforced by blocking the Agriculture Department from providing inspectors at meat plants that slaughter horses and is in place through Sept. 30.

There are currently no horse slaughter facilities operating in the U.S.

The vote came as the panel approved a Department of Agriculture funding bill."
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See my earlier posts on horse meat and it's bans here:  http://marketdesigner.blogspot.com/search/label/horse


HT: Itay Fainmesser
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Update: without fanfare, the Washington Times reports in December 2017:
"A Government Accountability Office report several years ago said the ban led to even worse conditions for horses, and the slaughter ban was dropped for a while. But advocates fought back, and the ban has been revived as part of annual spending bills, which block food inspections of horse meat, effectively prohibiting the practice.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/dec/26/wild-horse-population-control-methods-divide-lawma/

More on eating horse meat (and saving horses)

Eat ponies to save them - says charity

"It maybe be controversial but an animal group is the latest to endorse the Princess Royal's suggestion of eating ponies in a bid to save their species..
The Dartmoor Hill Pony Association (DHPA) says the best way to save herds on the ancient moorland is by creating a "market" for them by eating them.
It follows comments by Princess Anne endorsing eating horses to improve their welfare.
...
"Founder of the DHPA, Charlotte Faulkner believes herders will only continue to keep the animals if there is a "sustainable market" for them.
In a letter proposing the idea sent to South West Equine Protection (SWEP), she said: "I am writing to ask whether SWEP would consider giving measured support to this understandably upsetting subject, which as pony lovers we find so hard to accept."

HT: Shengwu Li

Horse meat served in an Israeli restaurant, with subsequent apologies

Here's the story from Haaretz: Psst! That's horse you're eating, Tel Aviv waiter admits
Turkiz serves horse regularly but didn't mention it in the dish description; waiter tells the couple what the menu didn't.

apparently the restaurant has horse meat on its menu, but left it out of the description of at least one dish.

(Many Israelis may share the American repugnance for eating horse, but an additional complication there is that horses don't have split hooves nor chew their cud and so are not kosher.  Apparently the sale of horse meat for human consumption is legal there, unlike here in California...)

HT: Ran Shorrer

Eating horsemeat is good for horses, says Britain's Princess Anne

The Telegraph has the story (and a video):
Princess Anne: why Britain should consider eating horsemeat
"The Princess Royal, who is President of World Horse Welfare, says that Britain should consider eating horsemeat because it would improve standards of care for the animals"

 "Princess Anne was speaking at the World Horse Welfare Organisation annual meeting when she made the comments:
"Our attitudes to the horsemeat trade may have to change" she said, because those in the trade "value their horses and look after them well" and therefore "should we be considering a real market for horsemeat and would that reduce the number of welfare case?
"I think this need a debate," the Princess Royal added."

Horses and slaughterhouses

Controversy about whether there should be horse slaughterhouses in the United States has made the news because of controversy between American Indian groups whose treaty lands are overrun by feral horses, and horse protection organizations that include actors who have played American Indian roles in films: On Fate of Wild Horses, Stars and Indians Spar

"Free-roaming horses cost the Navajos $200,000 a year in damage to property and range, said Ben Shelly, the Navajo president. There is a gap between reality and romance when, he said, “outsiders” like Mr. Redford — who counts gunslinger, sheriff’s deputy and horse whisperer among his movie roles — interpret the struggles of American Indians.
...
"The horses, tens of thousands of them, are at the center of a passionate, politicized dispute playing out in court, in Congress and even within tribes across the West about whether federal authorities should sanction their slaughtering to thin the herds. The practice has never been banned, but stopped when money for inspections was cut from the federal budget.

"In Navajo territory, parched by years of unrelenting drought and beset by poverty, one feral horse consumes 5 gallons of water and 18 pounds of forage a day — sometimes the water and food a family had bought for itself and its cattle.

"According to the latest estimates, there are 75,000 feral and wild horses in the nation, and the numbers are growing, Mr. Shelly said. They have no owners, and many of them are believed to be native to the West. The tribes say they must find an efficient way of reducing the population. Although it is common to shoot old and frail horses — and more merciful than a ride to the slaughterhouse — there are too many of them to be dealt with, and there is some money in rounding them up and selling them at auction.
...
"The United States has never fostered a market for horse meat, a dietary staple in places like Belgium, China and Kazakhstan. It does have a history of horse slaughtering, though; at one point, there were more than 10 such slaughterhouses in the country. The last three, one in Illinois and two in Texas, closed in 2007, after Congress banned the use of federal money for salaries for personnel whose job was to inspect the horses and the facilities where they would be slaughtered. (One thing inspectors look for is evidence of drug use on the horses, not uncommon among those once used for racing.)

"In their last year, the three plants slaughtered a total of 30,000 horses for human consumption and shipped an additional 78,000 for slaughter in Canada and Mexico, according to statistics by United States and Canadian authorities. Congress’s subsequent unwillingness to finance inspections made slaughtered horse meat ineligible for the seal of inspection it needs to be commercially sold, effectively ending the practice.

"Wayne Pacelle, the president of the Humane Society of the United States, a lead plaintiff in the lawsuit and one of the groups lobbying Congress to end horse slaughter, said its efforts were focused on preventing the killing of horses for human consumption “to avoid creating an industry that would turn horses into a global food commodity.”

"Horse meat is the Tatar's Viagra"

While horse meat may be repugnant in some places, the controversy over horse meat in Russia is over how to prepare it: Appreciation of the Horse, Well-Cooked

"In parts of Russia and throughout Central Asia, horse is a central feature in traditional cuisine and is considered almost mandatory on special occasions.
...
"Mr. Nasyrov buys much of his horse meat from trusted local producers in Tatarstan, the heavily Muslim region east of Moscow where, he said, residents ascribe even greater attributes to eating horse.

“Horse meat,” he said, “is the Tatar’s Viagra.”
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You can buy canned horse meat here.

Horse meat in Europe, continuing...

The European scandal over mis-labeled horse meat also reveals something about the cultural variation concerning horses as food, which plays into discussions about the common market...: Recipe for Divided Europe: Add Horse, Then Stir

"the horse meat scandal has brought into the open the deep divisions, cultural and otherwise, that bedevil the European Union. A meat that nearly all Britons consider revolting, for example, is cherished as a protein-rich delight by a small but loyal minority in places like Belgium, the home of the European Union’s Brussels bureaucracy and Europe’s biggest per capita consumer of horse meat. (Italy, with its larger population, eats the most horse over all.)

"For a surging camp of so-called Euroskeptics in Britain, the fact that horse meat has entered the food chain through a host of middlemen and factories scattered across the Continent stands as proof of unbridgeable cultural chasms that, in their view, make the European Union unworkable."
...
"It has also led a growing number of European food producers and stores to seek shelter in patriotism by assuring consumers that their meat comes entirely from within their own country’s borders. ...

"Growing calls for mandatory “country of origin” labeling on all processed meats sold in Europe have stirred concern in Brussels about a surge in what Mr. Borg, the health and consumer affairs commissioner, has called “veiled protectionism.” Until now, only unprocessed meat had to identify its place of origin.

“The Germans are saying we are only going to eat German products. The French are saying the same for French products. What happened to the common market? This is really serious,” said Françoise Grossetête, a French member of the European Parliament."

Human consumption of horse meat...some religious origins of repugnance

In the United States, the repugnance felt towards the human consumption of horse meat probably stems from our regard for horses as pets, and perhaps also from a feeling that they play a role in our national mythology, concerning e.g. the settling of the West.  But elsewhere, the repugnance may have a religious origin, or so says an article in the Canadian Veterinary Journal:

"Food avoidances and taboos have historically been based on religion, or have functioned to demonstrate social status differences between individuals and social groupings (18). Although Leviticus is silent on the specific issue of horse (19), in 723, Pope Gregory III indicated that the eating of horses was a ‘filthy and abominable custom’ in his instructions to Boniface, Bishop to the Germans (20). In Ireland, the Canones hibernenses, which date from the 7th century, impose an unusually harsh penance of 4 y on bread and water for the consumption of horsemeat (20). The explanation of this nonbiblically based Canon Law is that the consumption of horsemeat was associated with pre-Christian Celtic and Teutonic religious sacrifice (20,21). The church condemnation of horsemeat consumption was directed to suppressing pagan practices and distinguishing the Christian from the heathen (20,21)."

(From The United States’ prohibition of horsemeat for human consumption: Is this a good law?
Terry L. Whiting, Can Vet J., v.48(11); Nov 2007 )

Hat tip to Vanessa Wong of Bloomberg Businessweek, who interviewed me on the subject: What's So Bad About Horse Meat, Anyway?

Horse meat (unlabelled) in Britain and elsewhere in Europe

There has been a lot of press on the fact that horse meat has been discovered mis-labeled as beef in Britain, and now elsewhere in Europe. This (probably criminal) mis-labeling of a cheap and unregulated food product as something else is compounded by the fact that, in Britain at least, people prefer to ride ponies than to eat them. So, the main story line doesn't seem to involve repugnance per se (i.e. the reluctance of people towards other people eating horse meat). But it certainly involves some disgust.

Here are some of the stories:

The British Hate Horse Meat. The French Love Horse Meat. Americans? Meh.


Horse Meat in Food Stirs a Furor in the British Isles
"The labeling of horse meat as beef has breached one of the great culinary taboos of Britain and Ireland, two countries that pride themselves on their love of certain animals, particularly horses. The fact that the source of the meat appears to have been mainland Europe, where the consumption of horse meat is far more common, has raised suspicions of fraud because beef is more expensive than meat from horses."

Waiter, There's a Horse in My Lasagna

Horse meat and the economics of disgust

Eating horse meat in France: could it become repugnant even there?

Alex Peysakhovich sends along the following evidence that there are those in France who find eating horsemeat repugnant...and take out ads on buses. Of course the chevalines (horse butchers) are fighting back with stickers of their own...

Horse meat at the Harvard faculty club

At the Harvard faculty club (starting I believe in WW I or II) "members happily consumed horsemeat, obtained from the racetrack at Suffolk Downs. It was so popular, chicken-fried and served up with onion gravy that it stayed on the menu until 1985 when the new French chef refused to cook frozen food."

Note what the chef found repugnant.

Peter Coles snapped the following picture by the club's coat room, of a French political cartoon about the pleasures of hippophagy .

Friend or food? Horse meat for human consumption, Congress and PETA

Regarding the ban on slaughtering horses to produce horse meat for human consumption, see these previous posts. There have been a rash of recent stories about the recent Congressional reversal on this, including this unlikely story (as reported by the Christian Science Monitor): Lifting horse slaughter ban: Why PETA says it's a good idea

""Congress has found what many may think of as an unexpected supporter in its decision to bring back horse slaughter facilities to the US after a 5-year-ban: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the often-controversial animal rights group known for campaigns like “fur is murder."

“It's quite an unpopular position we've taken,” Ms. Newkirk says. “There was a rush to pass a bill that said you can't slaughter them anymore in the United States. But the reason we didn't support it, which sets us almost alone, is the amount of suffering that it created exceeded the amount of suffering it was designed to stop.”

"While PETA says the optimal solution is to ban both consumption slaughter and export of horses, it supports reintroducing horse slaughterhouses in the US, especially if accompanied by a ban on exporting any horses at all to other countries.

"There are now plans in over half a dozen states in the South and West to begin horse slaughter processing, a business worth about $65 million a year before Congress defunded the inspection regime. While unpalatable to most Americans, horse meat is eaten in Mexico, Asia, and parts of Europe.

"As Newkirk predicted, the end to domestic slaughter didn't curtail the number of horses being slaughtered for consumption, but, according to a GAO report, may have led to more inhumane treatment of old, abandoned, or neglected equines as greater numbers were instead shipped to Mexico or Canada for slaughter where the USDA doesn't have the authority to monitor the horses' conditions.

"The number of horses exported from the U.S. to Mexico, for example, increased by 660 percent since the de facto ban, the Government Accounting Office reported in June. Almost 138,000 horses were shipped out of the country for slaughter in 2010, compared to the 104,899 horses that were slaughtered domestically in the year before the ban took effect.

“It's hard to call [the end of the horse slaughter ban] a victory, because it's all so unsavory,” Newkirk says. “The [funding] bill didn't mean any horses were spared, but it does mean the amount of suffering is now reduced again.”
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Zhenyu Lai passes on the following related story, concerning the recent Congressional action (and which includes a video with the headline "Friend or Food?"): Horses could soon be slaughtered for meat in U.S.

""Congress has lifted a de facto ban on the slaughter of horses, a move hailed by Missouri farmers and state political leaders who say the prohibition had inadvertently caused more harm to the animals than good.

"But some animal-rights activists decried the little-noticed provision, which sailed to passage earlier this month and was signed into law by President Barack Obama on Nov. 18. And they vowed to keep the issue alive, pressing for an outright prohibition of horse slaughtering in the U.S."
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And Divya Kirti points me to a story that ends with 5 Reasons Not to Eat Horse Meat
including 4. Most Americans oppose horse slaughter.
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And also this one (which seems to ignore most of the recent history that involved the just repealed ban): The Empathy Test: Why Nobody Cares About Horse Slaughter
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And in other horse related repugnance news, Push to Ban New York Carriage Horses Gains Steam
"After campaigning for decades, animal rights advocates are gaining support for legislation that would ban the hansom cabs..."