Britain’s meaty tale

“Mixed metaphors
Muddled meanings
Broken promises
Broken hearts...”
From Wall Writings (Ed. by Bachchoo)

Here’s a tale of two arguments — perhaps three — that have made headlines in the UK this week.
The first is quite simple. Britain’s most colonising of supermarkets, a veritable Alexander, the damned of grocery outlets, Tesco, was this week discovered to have sold horse meat mixed into its “all-beef” hamburgers. I don’t know how this adulteration was discovered. I remember my grandmother being able to detect the slightest watering-down of the buffalo milk supplied by the milkmaid who came round in the morning with her urns, but how one would bite into a beef burger and know that there was some horse meat in it seems more enigmatic.
Nevertheless, the horse meat was discovered and Tesco was questioned and disgraced, promising to withdraw the stock, find and punish the suppliers.
In Britain they race horses, keep them as pets, ride them about under police and ceremonial Army uniforms and eventually send them to the knackers’ yard to be turned into glue, but they don’t eat them. There’s no law against it but they just don’t do it. This week though a couple of TV interviewers and TV chefs tried some in the interests of public argument. They showed us raw cow and horse steaks. They were then cooked on screen, chopped and sampled. Yes, they could tell the difference, but only because they knew they were at such a trial. All of them found the meat “delicious”.
It was a bold experiment. These bold chefs and and these interviewers will probably lose fans, just as there will certainly be people who will punish Tesco with a boycott.
I must admit that I have, on my travels in Poland and then in France, eaten horse steak. I did it just to try it out and test my inhibitions. I’ve done the same for crocodile meat in South Africa and for kangaroo and wallaby steaks in Australia. I’ve also eaten sharks and whales though I do sympathise with my eco-conscious friends who want to save whales for the planet by not massacring them for meat or blubber. All this I have done, and shall no doubt be punished hereafter.
But will I be? In the wake of the hoo-ha about horse meat from Tesco, vegetarians pointed out that if you are willing to send pigs, cows and sheep to slaughter, why draw a sentimental line at horses, dogs, cats or whales?
There must be a logical answer to that challenging question but except in the case of whales, I can’t think of one. In India, we serve up goat and call it “mutton” — which according to any dictionary is a sheep. We all know we are not eating mutton and are eating goat meat but we call it “mutton” because everyone else does.
The second argument entails hunting. The last Labour government banned the hunting of foxes by pursuing them on horses led by a pack of hounds that are trained to pick up the scent of foxes, chase them, catch them and tear them — 40 dogs perhaps to one fox — to pieces. Hunting in this way is an old British tradition and the protests against the ban manifested itself in a political movement called the Countryside Alliance. They lobbied the Conservative Party who then promised them in their pre-election manifesto to repeal this law and allow the merry hunting of foxes to proceed.
The Conservative Party formed a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, who are firmly against hunting, and so have to ignore their manifesto promise else would cause a rift in their coalition and lose the vote in Parliament.
The shooting and even poisoning of foxes by farmers and gamekeepers is legal. Hunting them by pursuing them on horses following trained dogs through wild country is not.
Again, as in the case of eating horse meat, there is a subtlety of logic involved. The ban on hunting is not aimed at preserving the fox population. It is aimed at stopping people who enjoy chasing foxes and watching them being torn to bits by dogs getting their kicks in this way.
There is some reason and some class-envy involved in the argument as the hunting fraternity which dresses up in red coats and funny caps to “ride to hounds” is led by country gentry and the objectors are city folk who want to ban cruel sports. It’s as though in ancient Rome one approved of the execution of Christians, but not of the spectacle in the Coliseum where people paid to watch them consumed by lions. (I would have, needless to say, been on the side of the Christians, in and out of the arena!)
The third in this tale of three arguments is more serious. It has been discovered that British clinics and doctors are assisting pregnant women to identify the gender of foetuses and to abort female ones. This process is illegal and seems largely to serve the Asian, subcontinental section of the population. Indians and Pakistanis are killing their unborn girls.
There is going to be a government and police-led operation to try and eliminate the practice. The anti-abortion lobby of Britain is now asking why there is an objection to aborting female foetuses and not one to abortion in general.
The law allowing abortion was framed, with the wind of feminist opinion and a “woman’s right to choose” behind it, to protect women whose health, physical and “psychological”, was threatened by pregnancy and to enable, without specifically sanctioning it, the abortion of foetuses which were severely affected by genetic disorders.
The “psychological” provision allowed for a lot of interpretation. Even so, an Asian woman can’t plead that giving birth to a girl would cause her severe mental agony and would send her psychotic because she and her family only want a boy. In the case of the gender of a child the woman has no right to choose. Nor should she have.