French lose taste for horse and find appetite for animal rights
February 12, 2004

They eat horses in France, don't they? Yes, but less and less, it appears. A report published yesterday showed that a long decline in the eating of horsemeat in France - reversed briefly by the BSE-driven beef scare in the 1990s - has accelerated, in the past two years.

France is down to its last 1,000 specialist horse butchers, or chevalines - from 1,300 in 1999. Paris has only 32 specialist shops; 20 years ago it had more than 100.

The French have a reputation for being willing to eat almost anything that moves and of not being too concerned about cruelty to animals.

Times are changing. There are now increasingly successful, political challenges in France to the corrida, or Spanish type of bullfighting; to the forced-feeding of geese and ducks to create paté de foie gras; and to the wearing of furs. There will even be a nude, anti-fur protest, by models, on the Avenue des Champs Elysées at midday today.

The changed times are most evident in attitudes to horsemeat, which has been a regular item on the menu in France since the mid nineteenth century.

Shock waves ran through the equine world last week when it emerged that bourguignon de poulain - foal stew - had been served to 250 leading French horse rearers at a gala lunch at the national stud in Annecy, eastern France.

One horse breeder protested: "This is disgraceful. The foals that we bring into the world should not be regarded as steaks on hooves."

Figures issued yesterday by the national office of meat and stock rearing showed that - after a brief peak in 2001 when there was an acute beef safety scare in France - consumption of horsemeat slumped by 17 per cent in 2002 and another 10 per cent last year.

The decline is partly attributed to public health concerns. Horsemeat is banned in restaurants in France, on the advice of the government's veterinary committee.

But there is also a change in the public's attitude, partly driven by the increasing popularity of horse and pony riding, and partly by a public awareness campaign led in the past nine years by an organisation called the Ethical Association of the Horse.

The association's slogan is: "Non, un cheval ça ne se mange pas." (No, a horse is not for eating.) Its website argues that horses, unlike cows, sheep or pigs, are "extraordinary animals ... which have for centuries shared the work of man, in the rain or the beating sun of the fields, work sites and roads, but have also participated in his insane wars and, even, his struggle for liberty".

While welcoming the new figures, the association points out that 850 horses are still eaten each day in France, more than 310,000 a year. (The Italians eat 350,000 a year, the Belgians 150,000 and the Dutch 80,000.) Most of the horses eaten in France are imported from Eastern Europe, especially Poland, but some frozen meat comes from as far away as Australia.

Defenders of hippohagie (the eating of horse flesh) say that the practice has helped to preserve some races of horses, especially large plough and draught horses, which might otherwise have died out.

Bruno Pourchet, the director of the Annecy stud which served "foal stew" to its lunch guests, was unabashed by the anger that his menu generated in the French horse world.

"None of the usual, local guests minded a bit," he said. "All this emotion, even if I understand it a little, shows that many horse breeders are not aware that 90 per cent of the foals born to plough horses are destined for the butcher's."

M. Pourchet has invited some of the breeders who complained to return to Annecy to meet people who raise horses, partly for meat. "They are people who love horses as much as they do but whose feelings are expressed in a different way," he said.

Julien Davin, 54, one of the last horse butchers in Paris, insisted he has seen no slump in sales at his small shop in the Poncelet market, not far from the Arc de Triomphe. Horse fillet and donkey salami were among the delicacies on offer yesterday.

He said Parisians had been eating horses since the siege of the city by the Prussian army in 1870. He had a faithful clientele and neither he, nor they, could see why eating horsemeat should be unethical. "Cows, horses, pigs, frogs and snails," M. Davin said. "What's the difference so long as the meat is good?"

Some of the credit for the changing attitude towards animals - at least in urban France - must go to Brigitte Bardot, the retired actress. Her animal welfare foundation has been at the forefront of campaigns against bullfighting and the wearing of furs.

Less creditably, she has also made explosive - and near-racist - attacks on Muslim residents of France for the ritual slaughter and bleeding of of live sheep and goats at the time of religious festivals. But Mme Bardot made peace yesterday visiting a Mosque in Paris and winning an assurance from its rector, Dalil Boubakeur, that nothing in the Islamic faith prevented the animals from being anaesthetised before their throats were slit.

M. Boubakeur said he would ask the French Muslim Council, which he leads, to consider the question and put out clear advice to the faithful. Mme Bardot said: "I have been waiting for this declaration for 20 years."

Before Christmas, another French animal rights group called on the European Commission to enforce its animal welfare rules rigorously and ban the practice of gavage - the forced feeding of ducks and geese with grain to make their livers swell up to 30 times their normal size to produce the much-prized paté de foie gras.