I’ve eaten horse meat many teams when I lived in Switzerland. (I think my Dad had become convinced somehow that it was better for your diet than beef - or else it was cheaper.) It is still easily available there as far as I know. Since he usually prepared it with a sauce, I couldn’t say exactly how different it was from beef.
Wait, did he get it from Arbys?
For bison, at least, it’s because it tends to be tougher, due to the lower fat content. I don’t know if the same is true for horse.
According to my ex-wife, who once made the mistake of eating some (she described it as TOUGH), “cheval” is in fact how it’s in the ingredient list in France.
There are specialty horsemeat butcher shops in Montreal, called “chevalines”. So cheval is about right.
Horse tastes like Chicken?!? Pish posh,not hardly…it does, however taste just like frogs legs, or snake, or alligator, or turtle, or rabbit, or kangaroo—and, don’t let the fact that they all taste like chicken diminish my point!
I was actually going to comment that to me, horse does taste quite similar to kangaro (and nothing at all like the others on your list).
In Iceland, horse meat is often smoked or salted, or made into a coarse ground smoked sausage. I find fresh horse meat here is far superior to the local beef in both flavour and tenderness. The flavour is quite sweet, and not at all gamey.
Growing up in Norway, everyone knew that there was horse meat in sausages, but back then ingredients lists used a collective term for beef and horse meat, so you were never sure. Now, horse meat has to be listed separately, and it is only used in certain kinds of cured sausage. An abattoir worker once told me horse meat was so dark and strongly flavoured, too much of it would ruin the sausage. He was probably right, but only because much of their horse meat came from older animals. Horses aren’t reared for slaughter in Norway, slaughter is basically an alternative to euthanasia for a horse that has outlived its usefulness through old age or injury but is still fit for human consumption. Cue many a teary-eyed “I’ll never eat sausage again” when a much loved riding horse was sent off on the lorry.
Here in the US, “tastes just like chicken” has become a cliche’ of sorts for eating any kind of meat not the “norm”.
Frog: chicken
Snake: chicken
Alligator: chicken
Do they say that about snails in France? 
Bet not.
I like shrimp (which definitely does not taste like chicken), but would I have been the first person to try eating one? With a gun to my head, maybe, but everyone who tries an exotic food for the first time is a “first-timer”, right?
Maybe something in our psyche just tells us: “go for it, Dude. John’s been eating it all night and it hasn’t killed him.”?
Q
There was a recent article in the Toronto Star about a restaurant that is now serving horse meat again after a long hiatus. Their speciality is a duck confit over a slab of horse, which they call “quack and track.” I have no desire to try and eat either animal, but that name is hilarious. 
When I was in Hungary, there were butcher shops that sold nothing BUT horse meat, especially in Budapest. I refused to have any.
But the customers should certainly be able to tell this, by the difference in taste.
Do places really serve bison? Or is it beefalo. I’ve had the latter and it’s quite good.
I’m more interested in how will this impact treatment of horse diseases, accidents, and other nasties. Animals destined for human consumption follow a different treatment schedule, such that some drugs are flat-out prohibited, and in other cases, there are “waiting periods”, days (weeks or months) were the animal, if ready for slaughter, cannot be killed (at least, if it is intended to enter the food chain).
In the case of horses, many are treated more like pets, and receive medications that would not be allowed in cows or pigs. Also, they are killed (euthanized) sometimes immediately, without waiting for the drugs to be eliminated from their systems. This does not mean that the horses cannot be used for something else, in fact, my lab separates horse carcasses and makes money off of disposed horses, but they’re used for manufacturing, not for food.
So a horse that will be intended to be used as food would have to be treated differently because of that outcome.
Derailing this slightly, but:
The UK is attempting to work around this with horse passports and microchipping. The idea is that certain drugs can only been used in horses whose passports state that they are not destined for the food chain (which would only be an issue if the horse was exported overseas, no horses are slaughtered in the UK for human consumption). The sole purpose of the passport system is to be able to use drugs that aren’t licensed for food producing animals
It’s illegal to own, sell, buy or transport a horse without a passport. The system has many, many flaws, which may or may not work themselves out over the next couple of decades. There are dozens of horse breed societies etc that can issue passports, and initially the application forms could be filled in by any “competent person” who was able to do an ID drawing. Theoretically, you could have any number of passports issued for the same horse. It was later changed, new passport applications now have to be filled in by a vet, and the horse has to be microchipped. This means there are a lot of horses still out there with no microchip and the only means of identification is a dodgy ID drawing and an estimated height. I’ve known horse dealers with drawers full of passports, buying horses from Ireland and picking passports that vaguely matched their markings. Amother issue is that some drugs are administered by the owners themselves, and never recorded in the passport. There is also a lot of confusion over whose job it is to police all of this.
In Iceland, all registered horses are microchipped. Any drug administered or prescribed by a vet is recorded in a national database, along with the meat withdrawal period (which in the case of some drugs is forever).
The main difference I see in terms of welfare is that old horses with chronic injuries or arthritis are more likely to be sent off for slaughter here, whereas in the UK they would often be kept going for years on medication.
Sending horses to a slaughterhouse would be far more humane than this. If they could have been sold for slaughter much suffering could have been prevented.
Eating horsemeat seems odd, but not particularly reprehensible to me… at least, not more reprehensible than eating other kinds of meat. I’ve had alligator, which I wasn’t fond of; I found it extremely greasy with a strong gamey flavour. That could have been the particular restaurant though. Bison, on the other hand, was excellent.
Yet. Wait 24 hours to be sure. 
Almost no horses are intended for food. (Wouldn’t make economic sense – horse growth is far less efficient than cows, pigs, etc. – they have been bred for centuries to be efficient food animals.)
Horse meat is just another way of disposing of the carcass of a dead horse, like rendering, incineration, & burial, but a less costly one for the owner. If your horse was treated with certain drugs during its last illness, that does affect how you can dispose of the carcass. It can’t be used for food (either animal or human), and in many locations, can’t even be buried, because of concerns about those drugs getting into groundwater.
As a decades-long officer of our State Horse Council, my position on horse slaughter plants is that I support them, reluctantly. The results of closing all US plants have been bad:[ul]
[li]more horses left neglected & even starving (especially in a poor economy).[/li][li]more horses abandoned or turned loose to fend for themself.[/li][li]oversupply of horses in the marketplace, and lower prices.[/li][li]horses, often elderly ones. being hauled long distances to Mexican & Canadian plants.[/li][li]less oversight of conditions in plants in Canada and especially Mexico.[/li][/ul]
So I would prefer that we have plants in the US, where people could keep watch over them, to make sure that the haulers & processors are not mistreating the horses.
Actually, a lot of farmers here would disagree. I often hear them comment that rearing horses to slaughter weight is more cost effective than rearing cattle. Of course, this would not necessarily be true for other horse breeds. Icelandics are quite low maintenance.
I was thinking of some racehorses (thoroughbreds), when I wrote that comment. While people hear about the woes of the top ones and the efforts to save them, very little is done to many of the racehorses at your local, small, hippodrome. My (admittedly small) experience was that they were sometimes treated no better than food animals.
toodlepip, interesting idea, and I bet US would face similar challenges (or bigger) than what UK is facing. And thanks for reminding me of the words I was forgetting (withdrawal period)!
I agree that death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to an animal, and the option of selling for slaughter can improve welfare standards to some extent, but this kind of thing would still be happening. It happens with farm animals that have a slaughter value, it happens with animals that have a sale value, it happens with animals that the owners genuinely care about. I’ve seen too many animal welfare cases to think that there is an easy answer. Sometimes there is a human tragedy behind it, sometimes just utter ignorance, sometimes people get overwhelmed and the situation escalates to a point where they are too embarrassed or scared to ask for help. The most disillusioning aspect of it is how extreme the situations have to be before serious action is taken. Most of the welfare cases I have been involved with have not gone to court, and the successful convictions often result in fines that come nowhere near covering the cost of prosecution.
But then they would have to know the difference.