CONSUMPTION OF HORSES

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27074, 24 June 1953, Page 3

CONSUMPTION OF HORSES

LITTLE REDUCTION IN BRITAIN

(Special Correspondent N.Z.P.A.) (Rec. 8 p.m.) LONDON, June 23. “Here are some shocks for horselovers,” says the “Manchester Guardian,” commenting on the annual report of the International League for the Protection of Horses, which reveals that horseflesh is still finding its way to British tables, “It had been supposed that the of horses to provide meat for human consumption might be rapidly diminishing owing to the increase in normal meat supplies to butchers in Britain over the last few months,” the paper says. “It had been thought that ‘meat men’ might be finding it increasingly hard to get further large supplies of surplus horses after the great depredations of the lucrative post-war years. “Now it seems that both these .suppositions wsre wrong. According to figures garnered by the league, the slaughter of horses for meat declined to 52,899 in 1952, compared with 61,400 in the previous year. This was a much smaller loss than the ‘meat men’ themselves had feared. Things were very slack indeed last summer, and in some quarters within the trade it was being predicted that the horsemeat market had collapsed at last. “Before the war the normal annual figure was 2000 or 3000 horses killed for British consumption. The figures from the league also show a slight decline in the nujnber of horses shipped, both from the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, to Britain. However, there has been an | increase in the trade from Eire to Belgium, and from Germany there is news of the development of a lucrative new export market in live horses, with the animals going for meat in large numbers to Belgium, France, Holland, Italy, and Switzerland. According to the Dublin branch of the international league, there ' were 32,998 horses shipped live by boat for slaughter in Britain and on the Continent, compared with .35,740 in 1951.”