A Consuming Interest in Horse Meat

Now that all that’s left of Thanksgiving is the leftovers, now that Jerry’s Famous Deli and the Original Pantry have cleaned up their acts for county health inspectors, now that we’ve seen enough of KCBS’s hidden-camera footage showing a kitchen worker picking his nose, let’s turn our attention to another culinary matters.

Viande de cheval.

Or, as we English-speakers would put it, horse meat.

What’s that? The thought disgusts you? If the menu at Saddlepeak Lodge offered “rack of Flicka” or “medallions of Mr. Ed,” you wouldn’t be tempted?

The French are less fussy and more adventurous. So are the Belgians and the Japanese. And because these cultures consider horse meat a delicacy--it retails for $15 a pound--a cavalry of horse-loving Californians is now campaigning to stop horse slaughter everywhere. Two days before Thanksgiving, an initiative drive was launched aimed at creating a state law that would ban the sale and export of horses for the purpose of human consumption.

Most voters, I suspect, will gladly sign the petitions, especially if they’ve seen the gruesome video of a Texas slaughterhouse being circulated by the Save the Horses campaign, jointly sponsored by the California Equine Council, based in Studio City, and Political Animals, based in Alamo, a town near Sacramento.

Emotions, of course, drive this issue. But to the degree we can put emotion aside, it’s worth pondering just how we, individually and collectively, draw the lines in our relationship with nature and those parts of nature we choose to devour. Except for the vegetarians among us, we might as well consider ourselves People for the Edible Treatment of Animals.

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Brian Reff counts on our carnivorous nature. As an owner of Reff Brothers’ Meats in Northridge, he considers animal flesh a commodity. For 17 years Reff Brothers has been a purveyor of exotic poultry and wild game, supplying restaurants such as Saddlepeak Lodge, Brandywine in Woodland Hills and Valentino’s in Santa Monica. If you’re in the market for pheasant, quail, venison, buffalo, rattlesnake, alligator, you might call Reff Brothers.

Reff is a friend of a friend. The three of us once dined at a Korean barbecue in Reseda. The pork was delicious. (The fact we don’t call it “pig meat” probably helped.) There was nothing so exotic on the menu. At any rate, California law would prohibit a dish sometimes served in Korea: dog.

When I called Reff the other day, I asked him if he had ever tried horse meat.

“Once,” he said. “It’s kind of sweet.”

Reff doesn’t deal in horse meat because there’s no local market for it. Americans don’t eat horse meat--an aversion that activists link to the role horses played in settling the West and the fact that so many horse owners consider Old Paint a beloved companion, almost a member of the family.

As for himself, Reff has no such moral objections to the tastes of the French, Belgians and Japanese. For him, the marketplace usually draws the lines. “Over the years,” he adds, “we’ve had a few run-ins with animal lovers.”

Several years ago, for example, he sold some exotic meat to a Santa Barbara restaurant. “They ran a special, somebody ate it, and pretty soon we had Fish and Game calling us.”

The meat was lion. Reff says he had all the proper documentation to assure authorities that the meat had been obtained legally.

In California, Reff says, state law prohibits the sale of meat of native species hunted legally in California, but not that of nonnative species, such as pheasant and partridge. Reff says his venison comes from deer raised on a farm in New Zealand and his alligator from farms in Louisiana and Florida.

All sorts of moral lines are drawn when it comes to hunting. Most people don’t think twice about the butchering of cattle, pigs, chickens, turkeys. These animals, it is said, were bred for that purpose. Ethicists may ponder: Is it more acceptable to eat a deer raised on a farm or hunted in the wild? And why is it that so many people who abhor hunting find nothing at all objectionable about fishing?

During my collegiate years, I spent one summer interning at one of America’s most rugged magazines. My boss at Field & Stream much preferred the field to the stream. Fishing, he argued, is far crueler than hunting. For him to do to a deer what the fisherman does to his prey, he explained, he’d have to put a large hook in the deer’s mouth, drag it to a lake and drown it.

I never did get his opinion on horse meat. But I’m sure he’d have a solution to the Valley’s puma problem.

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We aren’t all carnivores, of course. I got an interesting reaction when I asked Save the Horses activists Jeri Lerner of Studio City and Cathleen Doyle of Sun Valley where they draw their personal culinary lines. Lerner grudgingly identified herself as a vegetarian--”but not a vegan”--but emphasized that it was really irrelevant to the horse meat question. Doyle answered with a non-answer: “You know what? It has nothing to do with the issue.”

It’s understandable that they don’t want their cause perceived as something launched by animal rights extremists. Many meat eaters, they stressed, are involved in the campaign.

Doyle makes her argument on several fronts. Horses, she notes, are taxed as a luxury item, not livestock. Surveys show that Americans are shocked when they learn that tens of thousands of horses--often young and healthy--are trucked to Texas each year to be killed for meat in foreign-owned slaughterhouses. Imagine the outrage, she says, if people learned that dogs and cats were sold as canine and feline meat overseas.

One obvious result is that the law could simply create a new business opportunity for horse traders in Arizona. Lerner argues that the felony conviction proposed by the initiative would at least discourage the business and drive the costs upward. This would especially be true if other states followed California’s lead, as they did a few years ago after California outlawed the horse-tripping practice that was common in Mexican-style rodeos. Meanwhile, animal activist Brigitte Bardot is leading the battle in France.

Brian Reff seemed skeptical, wondering how the law would work. Many horse owners, he notes, are grateful a market exists that enables them to sell unwanted horses rather than absorb the cost of their disposal.

I was curious, incidentally, just what kinds of meat a man who has sold lion and eaten horse wouldn’t eat.

“Veal,” he answered. “I have a thing about putting too many things in my body. And as far as I’m concerned, white veal is pure chemical.”

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St. , Chatsworth, CA 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.