Dead Horses

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 501, 28 January 1949, Page 5

Dead Horses

E print the story that appears on Page 19 largely or because to most New Zealanders it comes so near to the incredible. It is sad, but no longer sensational, that farm horses afe disappearing everywhere in the world; and as fast in New Zealand as anywhere else. They are disappearing because they are no longer required, and no longer therefore being brought into the world. But the horses of Britain are disappearing because they are worth more dead than alive. They are being sold, slaughtered, and eaten, and the Government admits openly that it does not know how to stop the slaughter. All it even wishes to do, the discussion in the Commons suggests, is to stop irregular trading-selling secretly, and at prices above those fixed for this

class of meat. Farmers, it says, if they still want horses, must breed them a little faster, and the Government will do what it can to help them. Even the Manchester Guardian, when the discussion took place, found itself unable to comment except in the language of wonderland, and we suspect that most New Zealand readers will take refuge in the clouds of doubt. But the doubters are at least three years too late. The figures given to the Commons, and ‘nat questioned by the Ministry of Food, make it clear that about a thousand horses have been slaughtered every week since the beginning of 1945-a thousand that the Government knows about. No one knows what) the real figures are-and only the farmers seem to care. The position of course is that thousands of people in Britain are meat-hun-gry, and some hundreds of others ‘are exploiting that hunger. Before we feel too horrified in New Zealand we should ask how many animals we ourselves slaughter, how many more we eat than we require, how many we deny ourselves for the sake of the people of Britain, and why it is more "sordid" to eat a horse ‘when we no longer wish him to work than "to fatten and eat a cow when she is no longer profitable to. milk.