remival a écrit :
Lors d'un de mes voyages en Australie , un ami qui me recevait chez lui m'a dit que les français avait la sale tradition de bouffer de la viande de cheval et que à ses yeux s'était terrible...quand je lui avait dit qu'on avait encore des "boucheries chevalines" il a été horrifié et m'a dit qu'on devait être les seuls au monde à agir de la sorte......
Tu as raison, remival, que la plupart (peut etre meme tout) des aussies sont absolument contre mange le cheval, et meme l'idee d'un humain dans un pays developpe qui veut manger du cheval....
Je suis desolee, c'est pas votre faut, mais ce topic me fait sentir tres malade....
It's worse than when I was 8 years old and I discovered French people eat frogs legs... when at the time I kept tadpoles and frogs as loved pets.....I don't think I believed that at first either.
Bizarre that the horse meat subject comes up now, when just 2 weeks ago, notre groupe de L'alliance Francaise de Ballarat etait ensemble et quelqu'un a dit qu'ils ont entendu tres recemment que "les francais mange du cheval....."
Most of us thought it must have been a mistake, said "ooh yuck!" but refused to believe it (between us all we've been to France many times, and never come across it before).
Please, just don't tell me that it's also true that you eat it half-cooked (ou pire, half raw, like this Aussie told us)....I couldn't stand it.
We know that strange foods are eaten the world over, but it seems easier to accept for us to think of par exemple eating cats and dogs in Asia, because of overpopulation and food shortages.... but for a 1st world country without food/meat shortages, it's hard to get one's head around the idea that it's accepted and even promoted.
Of course, chacun son truc and all that....but when it comes to horse meat, I believe it would be almost impossible to find any easygoing Aussie who would take that attitude in this instance (even if we take it to most other things in life).
To us, it would be like having a faithful companion for 20 years, then killing it and eating it afterwards for dinner, like killing a pet dog.
And as for the difference between horse and any other meat....
For us, much of that difference would be that horses are companions, (usually long term), have a bond with their human owners, and have a much higher intelligence and longer life span qu'un vache ou un cochon. You only have to look at a Lippizaner white stallion performing, (like in Austria) to understand how intelligent horses can be.
Horse racing is a big thing all over Australia, and famous Melbourne cup winner Phar Lap was so feted that his body is stuffed in the Melbourne Museum for all to see and admire - that's how much of a hero some horses were/are.
Of course we know that horses eventually end up in the knackery, but that's at the end of its life or after illness, not in the prime of its life, and we know many horses end up as pet food, but that's a little easier to bear than the thought of human consumption...
There are stories in Australian folklore of famous Australian explorers who crossed the major Australian deserts back in the 19th century, ran out of food, and were forced to kill and eat their 'faithful animal companions' (I think that's how the books put it) in order to survive.... and Aussies felt sick even reading that, knowing it's the very last thing the Aussie explorer would have wanted to do, kill his own horse which had brought him 1000s of kilometres, and only the looming spectre of certain death otherwise forced them to do it....
Some Aussies feel a bit uncertain even about rabbits, "cute fluffy things, how could you eat them?" etc etc (my husband had pet rabbits as a boy and had a lot of trouble whenever we'd eat rabbit casserole at family dinners.... mais nous sommes de la campagne et c'est un peu different que dans la cite, and also, easier to eat an animal that was often at plague proportions, rather than one that was deemed 'special' or protected....)
Some Aussies would think that eating deer would be like eating little 'bambi', but then, we're just not used to eating deer here either (or duck either, for that matter, though we used to in the 'olden times' - especially before gun licencing started to become much more strict about 25 years ago)
But in the end, the fact that a deer isn't super intelligent, super useful or a daily companion, would mean that Aussies would surely in the end overcome the 'bambi barrier' and eat it if it was given to them, or turned into sausages or pies (the more acceptable way for us to eat 'unusual' meats, though I'm not exactly sure why)
So, to finish, I'm not blaming anybody for their choices of what they eat, (my husband is a vegetarian and has some trouble with the eating of ANY meat idea) - I'm just simply saying that an Aussie wouldn't stand for horse meat in any way, no matter what.
Kate