Replacement for pigs in Europe?
- Thread starter Otto Kretschmer
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All the examples in the wiki seem to be from after the period where the horse was seen as a valuable, prestige animal (Renaissance and later onwards).
There is no way that someone eats a horse pre-Renaissance - for the knight, it is his status, for the peasant, it is literally his livelihood (the same applies to oxen in the latter case)
Horse was eaten, but it was mostly limited to social untouchable groups like for example knackers and it was old or injured animals.
I'm asking again.
What about Bactrian camels? Could they provide any advantage over conventional catle/sheep/whatever?
What about Bactrian camels? Could they provide any advantage over conventional catle/sheep/whatever?
Camels are not in Europe, so... they don't live in Europe, it's too cold for them in Europe even if someone brought them over, so they have a TON of disadvantages...
No pretty much useless in Europe outside a narrow area around the Caspian Sea.
The Wikipedia link you give me does not talk about horse consumption in the Middle Ages but rather about horse consumption in modern times or in the 19th century. Moreover the argument put forward is not legitimate but utilitarian. For a long time the horse remained a horse that was only within the reach of lords and vassals because it needed to be fed.
Moreover, its conspicuousness was reduced because it was useful in warfare but also in agricultural work.
But if you can find me other sources proving that the consumption of horse meat in the Middle Ages was developed or that it was forbidden simply by Christianity I would be happy to read it and admit that I am wrong.
I can't believe I forgot to mention carp! Yeah, that features in Jewish cuisine. Gefilte fish? Carp.
Historically camels (kept by Tatars) were common also in Crimea/Southern Ukraine.
Taboo against eating horse seems to be Germanic thing, remnants of ancient Germanic horse worship, and was not universal in Europe (in PLC for example baked foal was delicacy enjoyed by nobles). Still, owning horse was luxury and access to horse meat was thus limited anyway.
The problem is not cold but humidity. Camels are adapted to dry arid regions.
along with being efficient 'garbage disposals', pigs have another advantage: they produce big litters of young, and you can increase their numbers pretty fast. No other big domesticated animal really compares to it...
English people preferring beef is quite recent, though. It's mostly to do with the cost. Same goes for chicken.
For a long time, beef was considered a more prestigious meat. Most people couldn't afford to raise animals just for their meat, with the exception of pigs. There's not an awful lot you can do with pigs that doesn't involve either (A) turning inedible things into more meat, or (B) killing it - with the exception of truffle hunting, but you can train dogs to do that (plus, the dogs aren't likely to eat the truffle).
Funny. The first paragraph under History in the linked article has this to say: "In many parts of Europe, the consumption of horse meat continued throughout the Middle Ages until modern times, despite a papal ban on horse meat in 732," which is rather easily verifiable elsewhere as well. Secondly, not all horses are prestige animals. Knightly horses and a draft horse are two very different things. People ate draft animals, frequently in fact, and excess males of any species are often culled and eaten. Funny that poeple don't think that applies to horses as well. Thirdly, and perhaps most relevant to the thread, Tatars (including Lipka Tatars in Poland) have a long history of horse consumption, and since this thread is explicitly about Muslims in Eastern Europe, the dietary habits of an existing Muslim group in Eastern Europe ought to tell us something useful.
My mistake, when I consulted the link with my phone it didn't appear.
I have to say that I am very surprised, I have often heard during my lessons that the consumption of horses was prohibited simply because a horse was too precious and that it was difficult for many people to get one.
Horses have only one stomach.
Cows have 4 stomachs. Cows convert grass into meat more efficiently than Horses.
Ye, the reason we don't comsume horse as example is pretty much because any horse take land away from cattle and one horse demand four times as much land as a cow (because of more picky diet and not being a ruminant), and the reason beef is rarer is because dairy cattle produce 10 times as many calories as beet cattle and still deliver meat as a byproduct.
Sheep and goats are mostly used in regions too marginal for cattle or in regions where a hot climate makes dairy less important.
Chickens are in many ways the inferior pig, but it's small size and it's high production of egg made it too useful to ignore and the meat again was mostly a byproduct.
Duck were great wetland animal a niche it pretty much had for itself, it got calories out of marginal land, which had little other use and it produced eggs as a byproduct. The reason it have become rarer by modern day is because the falling importance of wetlands. Duck is likely the closest to primarily a meat animal beside the pig.
Geese fall somewhere between cattle, chickens and ducks, but still enough it own thing that none of the other outcompeted it.
Pigs on the other hand are simply a perfect meat animal, it doesn't compete with any of the other animals (except too a small extent with chicken), it get rid of food which could be a health hazard and it's big and mean enough that you don't really need to worry about predators when you let it forage in the forest and more important at the same time cattle can graze and deer browse in the same forest.
The thing to remember is that horse are working animals which have a working lifespan and once that's exceeded their usefulness declines rapidly. This is just as true for dairy cows and oxen, their productivity declines as they age and after a certain point they're more valuable as food than as a working animal, and just as an ox is slaughtered with age so is a horse.
The bigger reason ducks aren't common today is that they're vastly more difficult to intensively farm than chickens. They need 3-4 times the space and need some access to water, neither of which is particularly conducive to factory farming.
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