ABSTRACT
In English-speaking countries the butchering of horses for their meat is regarded as a deplorable practice, falling somewhere between a moral failure and a crime. The subject of horsemeat consumption has therefore not been one over which Anglophone hippologists tend to linger. The books by Charles Trench, Augusto Azzaroli, and Juliette Clutton-Brock, otherwise informative, quickly concede that long ago people ate horses, and then hurry on to the more congenial subjects of driving and riding. Nor have hippologists writing in languages other than English made up for this deficiency. The pioneers-Hermes, Wiesner, and Potratz-said almost nothing about the horse as a food source. Hančar emphasized the evidence for consumption of horsemeat on the steppe, but Hančar’s book has seldom been read. Not surprisingly, many students of antiquity are unaware of the fact that for almost all of our species’ prehistory we valued the horse only for its meat.1
