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this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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Some cultures do eat horses without any taboos. Whether or not your culture does is linked to whether your ancestors cultivated wheat or rice. Wheat cultivating humans bred horses to help with tilling the soil and harvesting the wheat, making them too valuable to eat. Rice cultivating humans needed to cultivate and harvest rice by hand, resulting in horses being used for other things. In both cases, mechanization has resulted in horses being largely obsolete for human uses, but cultural bonds remain and they became pets, particularly in the wheat focused cultures.
I don't think we've deviated far at all. Our attitudes toward animals are the product of thousands or tens of thousands, depending on the species, of years of cultural development combined with the fact that we are, ultimately, just predatory social apes. We have an instinctual craving for meat, and culture directs that craving. Even our aversion to cannibalism is, ultimately, cultural.
We've only recently seen shifts in cultural attitudes toward meat consumption and general treatment of animals with very little deviation having occured since the first cities were founded. And those shifts were only possible due to recent advances in agriculture and the invention of the internal combustion engine. Things won't change quickly because nobody wants to be told that their beloved family recipe that they have fond childhood memories of is weird, or wrong, or evil. People tend to react poorly to having something they see as part of their identity questioned, getting aggressive, defensive, just shutting down, or digging in their heels and doubling down.
If your goal with this is to get people to stop eating meat, then I'll point out that people tend to respond better to possitive interactions. "I like that dish, and I've found you can replace [meat] with [alternative] if you're on a budget," or just suggesting a vegetarian or vegan recipe without mentioning that it's vegetarian will produce more possitive results than just telling people why they shouldn't eat meat. I've reduced my own meat consumption significantly due to that kind of thing. But you can't convince people not to do something if you don't understand why they do it in the first place.