In the time when men fought on horseback, there must have been hundreds of dead horses littering the battlefields along with slain knights and soldiers. What happened to the horse corpses? Did someone come along and drag them off, to use their hides, their bones and the rest of them for glue, animal feed, or something else? Or were they just left there to rot?
They cleaned up bodies of people who not horses?
soup’s on!
I’m guessing the vultures were delighted to see battles.
“Mmmmmm, Marge, let’s go out to eat tonight. Filet de cheval is half price at the Shoot’n’Eat Cafe.”
While I have no real information, I do know that soldiers were generally quite hungry, and without much energy left for collecting food. It would have been almost stupid not to eat them.
Not that I’d expect an officer to eat his own horse mind you, 'cause that would be akin to cannibalism. But for someone to eat a horse he didn’t know in those circumstances? Makes sense to me.
Crows. Ravens. Etc.
Before bloat set in, soldier food. After bloat set in, more likely raccoon food. I believe most would have been dragged off a distance and left on the surface to rot. Although there is evidence from at least the one mass grave of Napoleon’s retreat uncovered lately (Vilna?) that horses ended up in the same mass graves and the humans snow and then.
I’m betting/thinking based on how cavalry was used that many (or most) horses were crippled rather than out-right killed in battle. Too bad to heal but mobile enough to be taken to the fringes of the field and put out of their pain there - away from people and where the stink would be noticed as much. But that’s just a guess based on tactics.
In The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story, Elliott West quotes a classic of brevity from a common soldier’s diary:
“8/9 Fought”
“8/10 Ate horse”
Of course even a hungry army could eat only a fraction of the horses which fell in a typical battle, and afterward one or both armies would move on. Bears, coyotes, jackals, vultures, crows, wolves, insects, and bacteria would finish off the rest.
What does [properly prepared] horse meat taste like?
Not bad, a little gamy and tough. Dad recounted eating Army mules in WWII.
Carrion eaters: performing an important public service for as long as there’s been a public to serve.
It is still sold pretty commonly in parts of Europe so some European Dopers must know some recipes and how they taste.
I’ve only had it once, in sausages. Dark with a strong red-meaty taste - comparable to venison, not as gamey as kangaroo.
In some cases anyway, after this diverse list of diners had taken their fill, people would step in for the remaining items.
On the Cold Harbor battlefield, a journalist met ‘several negroes with large sacks, collecting the bones of dead horses, which thay sold to the bone-grinders of Richmond’.
Link.
My ex had “saucisse de cheval” in Norway by mistake. (Instant karma for her: she was au pairing and sampling the contents of her hosts’ fridge.) Her verdict: “chewy and strong.”
In medieval Britain, knackers and sausage makers would more or less be standing off to one side, ready to butcher as much meat as they could cart off.
I presume the bones and offal would just have been left for scavengers, although presumably farmers would clear debris off their fields.
Nah,
Shortly after. It takes time to raise an army, after you have a public.
Tris
It was widely reported that great flocks of carrion crows followed armies. That may have been true or it may have been reported as a form of psychological warfare, but it was often said.
John Keegan, in his excellent book, The Face of Battle, describes Waterloo (I’m quoting from memory):
All battles are disasters, and Waterloo was a greater disaster than most. In an area little more than a mile square, 40,000 men and 20,000 horses were killed or wounded in an afternoon.
He goes on to speculate about possible reasons for the widely-reported inability of the survivors to deal with the wounded. Almost universally, British soldiers slept or camped after the battle and ignored the thousands of wounded men and horses all around them, and did nothing, despite (or perhaps because of) evidence of terrible suffering. The British were exhausted from much marching in rain without food before the day-long battle, but Keegan speculates that the psychology of disaster was at work, the phenomenon where people seem dazed and helpless after seeing great trauma.
The Prussian allies reportedly wandered the field enthusiastically bayoneting the wounded (many of whom were, admittedly, untreatable by the medicine of the times).
Most likely the horses, living and dead, were ignored for the first day or so, then bayoneted and the ones too-long dead to reuse were probably buried in mass graves.
War is a terrible thing.
Along with every army comes yet another sizable army of camp followers. Those folks gotta eat too.
During the American Civil War, dead horses would often be burned in massive bonfires after battles. The smell was, by all accounts, overpowering. A Three-Minute Speech: Lincoln's Remarks at Gettysburg - Jennifer Armstrong - Google Books