The case for eating the wild horses out West

Washington Post

3 days ago

Why is it that Americans eat cows and pigs but not horses and dogs?
There's only one reason: custom. We're used to it, that's all. There's certainly nothing about horses and dogs that renders them inedible; people in other places happily eat them. There's no moral argument that doesn't also apply to the cows and the pigs. The only difference is that we think of cows and pigs as 'food' and horses and dogs as 'pets.' And not only do we not eat pets, but we also bristle at the very suggestion that they can be eaten.
Well, start bristling, because we should absolutely, positively, eat the wild horses that are wreaking havoc in the American West.
The horses are a problem and have been for decades. Many come under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which oversees some 25 million acres where the horses live. The goal, according to the BLM, is healthy horses and healthy rangeland. The problem, though, is that horse herds reproduce quickly (per the BLM, they can double in four or five years), and that's bad for the land and the animals, as the land gets overgrazed and the horses struggle to find enough to eat.
In the past four years, the BLM has rounded up just over 46,000 horses. (It also does burros.) Less than half of them found adoptive homes, and the rest live out their lives in BLM holding facilities. Right now, there are about 60,000 horses in those facilities — and they cost about $100 million per year to maintain.
There is, predictably, disagreement about whether we should have herds of wild horses roaming public lands and what constitutes a healthy population of them. There's also debate about whether it's horses or livestock that are causing the overgrazing damage (the BLM denies that the horses are removed to make more room for cattle) and whether you could manage the horse herds using contraception (the BLM does use some contraceptive methods on a relatively small percent of the herd, but shooting contraceptive darts and rounding up animals for vaccines is difficult with far-flung herds).
I'm not here to adjudicate these issues. Everyone agrees that rangelands can support only so many horses, and the herds need to be managed to stay within those limits. What do you do with the excess? To have the government pay $100 million a year to maintain wild horses is a waste of money — but also a source of methane.
Horses aren't ruminants (cows, goats and sheep are), but their digestive systems nevertheless emit methane. A back-of-the-envelope calculation, based on estimates of 58.8 million global horses emitting 1.1 megatonnes of methane per year, gets us to about 19 kilograms of methane per horse, per year, about 20 percent of cattle's emissions. Horses' manure also emits, but it's hard to find reliable data on just how much. Let's just say some.
The idea that we should eat overpopulated animals that are doing environmental damage is mostly noncontroversial for animals that aren't horses. If there's a Lionfish Protection Society, I sure haven't heard of it. Asian carp, wild pigs and Canada geese on menus likewise don't get people bristling. And although deer, arguably more charismatic than any of those, have their defenders, hunting them is a perfectly well-accepted part of life here.
If you're going to eat an animal, an overpopulated, wild one is the way to go; you get dinner and your environmental protection merit badge in one fell swoop. I've argued that the most responsible meat you can eat is wild venison. But lionfish, wild pigs — and horses — are right up there with it.
The only thing standing between us and a climate-friendly piece of the meat-eating puzzle is our visceral aversion to killing this one particular kind of animal. I blame 'Black Beauty,' and also John Wayne, for getting us to internalize the idea that horses are to be ridden, nurtured and admired as symbols of the American West, and not to be eaten.
If we think about other things that stand between us and feeding humans without destroying the planet, the obstacles are a little more concrete. There's competition for land use. Climate change is making farming harder. Insects and fungi are developing resistance to pesticides. We still have trouble getting food to the world's poorest. There's a long, long list of really hard problems.
So if your only objection here is that you don't want to kill a horse, I think you should just get over it. If it helps you to get over it, humans can, with care, give that horse a more humane death than it's likely to get in the wild.
And doing all this humanely is critical. I think the way we raise livestock in this country has, for the most part, lost its moral compass, and we've become inured to keeping animals in small cages or overpopulated barns. Horror-show slaughterhouse videos of animal cruelty populate our media feeds. Horses we're going to eat — like any animal we're going to eat — deserve a good life and as painless a death as we can give them.
If we could accept horses as food, it's a win on two fronts: We solve the problem of overpopulation, but we also potentially open up a new source of farmed meat. Most people who have eaten both (I haven't) report that horsemeat and beef taste very similar. (And when horse found its way into Irish and British burgers in 2013, nobody noticed until Ireland's food safety regulatory agency ordered DNA testing.)
Horses, like ruminants, can turn food humans can't eat — grass — into high-quality protein, but they don't have nearly the level of methane emissions. If we could find our way to substitute horses for cows, it could be a piece of the meat-eating puzzle. And, if Americans just can't bring themselves to eat horsemeat, we could at the very least send it to other places, where people do it as a matter of course.
First, though, we would have to solve the pesky problem of law. The same 1971 law that put the BLM in charge of wild horses specifies that you can't kill them. And the fact that the Trump administration wants to reverse that may not help win hearts and minds in the community of people fighting for animal welfare and environmental protection.
So I'm not expecting instant consensus here. But if you're thinking about ways to reduce the impact of your diet, and your only objection here is visceral, maybe it's time to reconsider. If that seems like a big ask, I've got some vegans who would like a word.