(OK, that’s not really the right title but)
Another from JMcAndrew:
Why is he scratching himself with his foot? Is the joke supposed to be that his wife is feeding him dog meat and he’s mimicking dog behavior?
I dunno either. But it does make me think of the classic joke:
I was at the grocery store checkout buying a large bag of dog biscuits and a woman behind me asked if I had a dog. I was feeling a bit crabby, so I told her no, I was starting The Dog Biscuit Diet again. I added that I probably shouldn’t, because although last time I lost 50 pounds, I ended up in the hospital in intensive care.
Her eyes about popped out of her head. I went on and on with the bogus diet story and she was totally buying it. I told her that it was an easy, inexpensive diet and that they’re nutritionally complete: the way it works is to load your pockets or purse with biscuits and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry.
Finally she asked if something in the dog food had poisoned me and was that why I ended up in the hospital. I calmly said no…I was sitting in the street licking myself when a car hit me.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Dog food traditionally used horse meat as part of its formula, since humans wouldn’t (or weren’t allowed to) eat it. At least in the US.
“Is the joke supposed to be that his wife is feeding him dog meat and he’s mimicking dog behavior?”
Yes. That’s the joke.
But he asked about horse meat, not dog meat.
I think Mark H has it. My recollection is that horse meat was (formerly) used in dog food, and google agrees.
There is a sort of upscale diner place — e.g. specialties for eggs or “our signature cheeseburger” — in Chicago called “Au Cheval” (I think they were originally in New York). The also have branches in neighborhoods with limited menus , including one a couple blocks from me, under the name “Small Cheval” .
I haven’t been there yet. Even though there is some fanciful story about the name, a part of me is convinced it is their confession that they serve horse meat.
Ah, horse meat, one of those cultural biases you don’t even know you have till something comes along and makes you aware of it. We hosted an exchange student from Kazakhstan for three weeks, and one of the many cultural discussions we had was regarding horse meat. In Kazakhstan, it’s a delicacy, and he was eager to share his culture with us, but here you cannot get horse meat — it is illegal! It’s not as if there is inherently anything about horse meat that is more dangerous than cow meat, it’s just we have a history of it being deemed an inferior meat, with fraudsters trying to pass the cheaper, “inferior” meat off as a more “superior” one, so we went overboard and actually banned the selling of it to humans 100 or so years ago. But it’s not the same as banning putting paste in milk or chalk in flour, but yet, especially among the older generation, you talk about eating horse meat like it’s eating mercury.
(The ban on horse meat varies from state to state; we went to an Uzbek restaurant with him, the closest to Kazakh we could find, and he and the owners had a nice, longing discussion about how they missed having horse meat; according to the owners, you can get it in Texas, though I don’t think you could serve it even there in a restaurant, only for personal consumption.)
(I use this as an example of how the Golden Rule — do unto others as you would have them do unto you — needs to be revised to the Platinum Rule — Do unto others as they would want to have done unto them, and hope they reciprocate. We don’t want to be served horse meat because, It’s Horse Meat! Eww! So we don’t allow it to be served to our Kazakh exchange student, who is desperate to have some — fail. Golden Rule is a good first approximation, but could stand improvement.)
My ex-wife is from Kyrgyzstan, a small country neighboring Kazakhstan. When we journeyed over there, the horse meat dish was okay, but the way they do horse milk was a bit tough to power through.
I’ve never heard of horse meat in the US being considered inferior as meat, but rather the horse itself as a being is superior. Horses aren’t exactly cats or dogs, though in modern times many horse owners consider them very close, but historically they worked for people and interacted/were trained in a manner very different (usually) than the chickens, pigs, and cattle we eat. Obviously some cultures have no problem reconciling the two views (livestock & companion/servant/coworker) but the US and I believe the UK do. And obviously such attitudes persist.
Horse meat is not actually illegal in the US, but selling uninspected meat is, and there are no USDA inspectors for horse slaughter (by law for a while, and when that was no longer the case no such inspectors were ever hired so it was effectlvely the same).
As for horse meat going into dog food, long ago as a child (1970s) I read a biography of Wild Horse Annie which detailed the inhumane capture of mustangs and their sale for slaughter mainly to go into dog food, and her campaign in the 1950s to end this. I believe the instant connection of horse meat to dog food would be much more likely among older people who are aware of or at least closer in time to this history.
I think there may be a little more to this than horse meat is inferior. We don’t eat dogs either, even though other cultures do. Horses and dogs are relatively intelligent creatures and Americans give them more respect than mere herd animals. Even work horses usually get names, and we generally don’t eat something we’ve come to treat as an individual,
Ninja’d by Anne…
As a kid I read the book Henry Reed’s Babysitting Service. One subplot features the service putting together an impromptu cookout. When the mother goes to reimburse Henry for the food, he tells her that he used hamburger meat from their freezer. She informs him that was ground horse meat for their dog Consomme (named for the way he wiggles when he wags).
I know I read at least one “Henry Reed” book, and in fact checked it out from the library repeatedly to read and enjoy again. I don’t remember that bit that Brian recounts, but probably the book I read was “Henry Reed, Inc.”.
I made a point of rereading Henry Reed’s Journey when we drove across the US in 2008. There wasn’t as much in it as I had remembered, though…
For a long time, my all-time favorite book was In Search of a Sandhill Crane by Henry Reed’s author Keith Robertson.
Horse meat appeared on menus during World War II when there was rationing, and may have been served to soldiers judging from some animated cartoons from the time that I have seen. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Harvard Faculty Club put horse meat on the menu. It was considerably less expensive than beef, pork, veal and lamb. It appears that some of the faculty developed a taste for it. One said it was better than venison.
After World War II, the club took it off the menu — but people complained. So it stayed on. Time and again it disappeared from the menu but went back on until the complaints resumed. One purveyor of horse meat told a reporter that they had only three clients for it: the zoo, the dog track and the Harvard Faculty Club.
I think it was not until the 1970’s that horse meat disappeared from the menu for good.
Reference: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1994/2/10/high-class-horse-steak-pbtbhere/
If you ask me, part of the problem is that English doesn’t have a name for horse meat. Poultry and fish we’re fine with, but when it comes to consuming mammals, we’re used to being able to use a separate term for the meat, almost like a euphemism.
(Side note: most of you probably already know this, but the practice derives from the early second millennium, when the nobility in England all spoke Norman French [a Romance language] and the peasants still spoke early English [a Germanic language]. Words for livestock tended by peasants — cattle/cow/calf, sheep, pigs, deer — derive from Saxon, while words for the meat eaten by nobles derive from French — beef/veal, mutton, pork, venison.)
Obviously there must be another factor at play, because Americans sometimes eat lamb or bison, but almost never horse. But I think it’s a partial explanation.
Another side note: an Australian company apparently once tried to come up with a word to mean “kangaroo meat” in order to market it in the U.S. It didn’t really work.
Powers: We can always make up new words for food, changing bad names to good. Chinese Gooseberry didn’t sell well, but now Kiwi Fruit does fine. Who would ever use Rapeseed Oil to bake a cake? You wouldn’t be allowed to offer it to the kids. Fortunately you can buy Canola Oil now.
I checked to see if the Library had the Henry Reed books in electronic form, but it appears that those were never converted. Another amusing bit from HRBSS had to do with a brother/sister that didn’t like Henry much, partially because his father was a diplomat and he had traveled a lot and could top some of their rich kid brags.
Somehow, Henry was babysitting, and the brother was cleaning the pool, with the hose running through a basement window to a faucet down there. When finished, he dropped the nozzle into the pool (I guess it was the old twist-style) then went down to the basement, shut off the water, and disconnected the hose, but leaving it there. Henry notes some water pooling on the floor. The sequence ends up siphoning the pool into the basement.