Eating Horse Meat

The horse has been one of the most useful animal domestications that humans have ever attempted. The animal can be used for transportation, hauling goods from one place to the next, and as a food source. Horse meat has not always been highly sought after, but the horse has played its part in the nutritional development of human beings.

Before humans sought to domesticate them, horses roamed the grasslands of Eurasia. Cave art identified as being from the Paleolithic era focuses on horses as an object of beauty and as a food source. Paintings show people armed with spears chasing them down, or loan pictures of them frolicking. With the evidence currently on hand, historians have come to the conclusion that the horse was domesticated somewhere in the grasslands of Ukraine near the fourth millennia BC.

Horses were primarily used to pull wheeled conveyances, like a plow or a cart, but some historical evidence from the time points to their consumption too. Equine meat was considered acceptable for roughly the first 3,000 years that the horse was domesticated. 

Judaism and Islam are the primary factors for the declining consumption of horse meat. Clerics would have abstained from horse meat as a badge of faith. There were also cases where horses simply didn’t exist in a particular region. 

For the Mongols, the horse was like lifeblood. Genghis Khan used horses to form a kind of Pony Express, where his commands could get quickly relayed from post to post. Riders also used horses as a food source, tapping them for horse blood or horse meat as needed. In fact, most historians would consider it impossible to perceive the Mongols without horses.