It is immoral and un-British to eat a horse

By Tim Stanley Politics Last updated: February 12th, 2013

The elite's attitude towards the horse meat scandal smacks of cultural relativism

I’m sure we’re all sick of the horse meat puns – after all, the Findus scandal is “neigh” laughing matter. Badum-tish. But seriously folks, all this talk of “closing the stable door after the horse has bolted” articulates the oddly frivolous air in which the horse meat trade has been discussed, as if the whole thing is only a matter of taste. Never mind that it potentially involves a criminal conspiracy, that we were sold meat from countries whose livestock is often diseased or that some now fear we may have been swallowing donkey. As far as our liberal elite is concerned, our aversion to horse meat is irrational and silly. It’s all a matter of anthropology, Mary Beard told Question Time – tired old prejudices holding us back from gastronomic liberty. “Actually moggy would be nice and chewy and tasty, but none of us want to do that. If we are not vegetarian, we’re happy with chicken, and horse divides Europe, but I can tell you I had it deep-fried in Slovenia and it was gorgeous.”

Of course, there are parts of the world where the locals would be quite happy to deep fry Mary Beard, which proves the point that we don’t have to base all our decisions about how to live our lives by the standards of reason laid out by clever-clever college professors. Nobody is hurt by cannibalism and the consensus is that human flesh tastes like succulent chicken. And yet some primitive part of us prevents us from eating each other. Why?

In Monday's Telegraph Boris Johnson, Mayor of Londinium, penned a witty and thoughtful piece about the nature of taboo. It’s how we define ourselves as a society, he argued, creating a sense of difference from others. If he’s right then the liberal response to the horse meat scandal reflects to the way that British identity is breaking down, becoming part of the global soup of international pop culture. It certainly represents the death of our relationship with the countryside. In times past, we relied upon and venerated horses as much as we do dogs today. According to Annie Gray,

From the early medieval period onwards, the horse grew in importance. Of symbolic status, as a riding animal in peace and war, and beast of burden, it featured in tapestries and paintings as a noble beast, often clad in armour or adorned with fine cloths. It made no sense to consume an animal rich in symbolism and expensive to buy and maintain, when farming gave us ready supplies of other, similar foodstuffs, namely beef and mutton.

Eating horse became associated with poverty and, by extension, barbarism. So the elite’s present ambiguous attitude towards horse meat is one part of the cultural amnesia brought about by fast paced social change.

There is so much that we’ve forgotten. It was once thought that to be British was to always say “please” and “thank you”, to form queues with enthusiasm, to eat “meat and two veg”, to drink warm beer, to wear a hat to church and to regard sex as something foreigners do. A walk through any town centre on a Saturday night suggests that this bourgeois puritanism is all but gone. The tragedy is that with it has passed the sense that taboos define a nation and that, by extension, the nation is a moral enterprise. We used to think that what made us definitively British also made us morally superior. Think of the moment at the end of Carry on Up The Khyber when our heroes politely eat dinner while rudely assaulted by the natives. Of course, there’s an intrinsic racism within this scene that our national pride once blinded us to. Thankfully, imperialism has become a new taboo and to be British today is to be tolerant rather than chauvinist. But it’s still hard not to watch Britons make polite conversation above the roar of gunfire and miss the sense of national moral definition that it evokes. I bet Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond never ate a horse.

Therefore, the “so what” attitude towards horsemeat is troubling in three regards. First, it’s cultural relativism – the outlook that holds that ethics are artificially constructed and up for constant negotiation. The horse eater, like the cannibal, is different from the beef eater only in terms of taste. Second, it’s another example of the general dropping of standards that has characterised our national decline. There is no need for taboo in a society without a sense of sacred. That it might not be right to farm and butcher an animal as magnificent and intelligent as the horse doesn’t cross the mind of someone who is only interested in satisfying their stomach.

Third, it divorces us yet further from our history and identity. That Britain is fast becoming a sterile society that conforms to urban and elitist tastes is reflected in this extraordinarily unBritish paradox: it is now illegal to hunt foxes but it is becoming socially acceptable to factory farm horses. Our world has been turned upside down.