Horse meat served in an Israeli restaurant | האתר של ד"ר אריאל צבל

In the last few days, the Israeli media is obsessed with a new horse meat scandal. The story has been exposed after a couple ordered a "special" dish in a hotel restaurant in Tel-Aviv. Inquiring about components that "looked and smelled very odd" the costumers were told, quite reluctantly, that it was horse meat, imported from Hungary.

Much like the horse meat scandal in Britain on January, the new scandal is mainly about not informing the costumers. They were perfectly OK with eating a chicken and dead marine animals, yet eating a horse shocked them, as it would shock the great majority of Israeli meat-eaters.

Yet, in fact, that restaurant sells horse meat regularly, and trade in horse meat in this country is probably not as rare as it would seem. Hungary, which also exports foie gras to Israel, marks itself as a source of extra-cruel meats; yet horses are slaughtered in Israel as well. As slaughter and trade are done illegally, it is virtually impossible to follow the scale of this practice. A big exposure of horse slaughter inside Israeli territory is remembered from March 2001, after a channel 2 "Uvda" team documented a man who bought horses and donkeys, killed them inside some yard at Jaffa, and sold their meat as cattle meat.

The "Uvda" exposure mentioned much cruelty in the process. In fact, the "legitimate" slaughter of "ordinary" species is just as cruel, but apparently eating a particular species must be taboo before many meat-eaters contemplate cruelty.