dew
Feral Kid
Posts: 2224
Registered: 05-08 |
kristus said:
I may be mistaken, but you've not given me any reason to believe you. While it's true that in times of need, people has gone to eat whatever animal they can find, even pets. Horses generally aren't in overstock even in the times when they were still used for labor.
look, i'll freely admit i don't have any numbers ready at my hand. this is fairly basic stuff, though. we're talking about the era before agriculture was industrialized - horses were very common for daily labour, you could find a few on every farm and they were irreplaceable for, say, hauling wood in the hilly terrain. even my granddad told me stories of watering big herds of horses just before '48 (cz, not the wild west). then the industrialization made them obsolete and in the eastern bloc there was even a "tractorization" period of confiscating and slaughtering excess horses, which meant pretty much all horses.
The kind of horses you talk about weren't exactly the race horses we got today where they got these toothpick lower legs that snap like twigs. Also, horses live quite a long time most of them. And those who had them would hardly consider killing them just to sell their meat for cheap. I'm sure it happened that they got injured and they decided to make a buck from a bad situation.
oh, true. we still use the term "brewery gelding" (direct, perhaps sloppy translation, sorry) to call someone really strong. but they eventually grew weak or got ran down by excessive demands of the master. the meat was always used up if it wasn't diseased... and i will admit that might be why it was considered low grade. it was usually old and tough from work. no one sane would keep horses as slaughter animals.
But hardly in the quantities you were suggesting.
again, gotta think of the time period - these were the times when most people ate meat once or twice per week. if they were fairly well off. large quantities of any meat weren't (mass-)produced at all. i could probably find you some web literature if you're interested and don't want to let me off easily, but to be honest, most of my knowledge is contemporary movies (i don't mean retro), documentaries and bits of anecdotes from oldtimers.
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01-16-13 21:02 
