Hippie Scandal

One Paris family out of ten eats horse regularly because dark-red, sweet-tasting horsemeat costs two-thirds the price of beef. Last week 60 poor residents in the slums of Maisons-Laffitte, a swank suburb whose horsy upper-crusters include Frank J. Gould, felt agonizing gripes in their stomachs. Emergency squads with stomach pumps worked all night. Afterward the partially digested horsemeat thus obtained was analyzed by police chemists, showed traces of deadly drugs. Cracked Frank J.'s witty Manhattan secretary: "Maisons-Laffitte is known as a town of 15,000 horses and 5,000 souls."

Fast detective work traced the 60 stomachaches to one old horse, a veteran of the French turf. To keep him going all these years his trainers had doped him consistently, more & more. His system had become slowly tolerant and partially immune to huge hypodermic shots of dope which would have killed another horse. When the old plug gave out at last he was bought by an unsuspecting butcher with the usual gold horse's head over his door and the usual polite euphemism on his sign "BOUCHERIE HIPPOPHAGIQUE."

Under the law of France he who butchers horsemeat can butcher no other sort of meat; French housewives obliged to serve their families "poor man's meat" are sensitive about it. In Paris alone 69,323 horses were served up last year. German horsemeat shops employ no euphemisms, no golden horse, paint over their shops such blunt signs as Wir verkaufen das beste Pferdefleisch ("We Sell the Best Horsemeat"). In Rhenish-Westphalia the little city of Solingen boasts that in the record year 1929 its citizens ate 3,484 horses. At picnic parties of Adolf Hitler's famed "Strength Through Joy League" the garlic-flavored sausages joyously washed down with golden beer are of horsemeat. enriched with hog fat.

As the world's largest exporter of horses destined to be eaten by others, the British Empire also leads in pointing out the iniquities of the horsemeat industry as conducted abroad after the beasts have been bought and paid for. Three years ago a staff artist for the Illustrated London News produced a classic series of anti-horse-eating sketches (see cut). In Paris humanity to horses about to be eaten is preached by L'Intransigeant, striven for by La Ligue Franc,aise pour la Protection du Cheval. Main reform urged is to kill the old nags where they are and go to the expense of transporting their meat in refrigerator cars. Now they are made to transport themselves and frequently not fed between purchase and slaughter some days or weeks afterward, to save fodder.

A kill-the-horse-first bill is often introduced in Britain's House of Commons, has been urged by such humane M.P.'s as the new Governor General of Canada, John Buchan, ist Baron Tweedsmuir, but has never been passed by His Majesty's Government. Against such a bill the argument runs that "poor man's meat" is essential to human life in the slums of impoverished Europe and that if horsemeat is made more expensive by humanity to horses, the humanity to half-starved humans will be less.

Largest eaters of horsemeat in the U. S. are dogs, who get it chiefly in a can called Ken-L-Ration. Tastiest cuts for human consumption are the tenderloin, tongue, liver and hindquarters. Experts consider that if horses were bred like cattle the slight toughness of horsemeat, which is not so tough as venison, would be readily overcome. While not admitting ever to have cooked horsemeat, Brooklyn's Pratt Institute declared last week that the tender cuts should be broiled like beef. Less tender cuts, meat for the poorest of the poor, should be scored, pounded and marinated in oil & vinegar, pot-roasted or as a last resort hamburged.

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