That’s why when I cook venison I ADD fat/oil to the dish. Venison is extremely lean meat and it really doesn’t taste good without some added fat. Which sounds horrible to many modern folks but you just add enough to bring it up to the fat content of lean beef or a pork roast. By itself it’s too dry.
I get it with the food allergies: “Oh, these tomatoes won’t bother you - they’re organic!” (Yes, yes they will) or "these tomatoes won’t bother you - I cooked them thoroughly! (Yes, yes they will). Or try to sneak something into my food to prove it’s all in my head and not real. That one I’d say is 50/50 men and women.
It’s a weird power-play that it would never occur to me to engage in, yet there’s a bunch of people out there who do this. And then there is this thread.
I’ve seen it at hallal meat sellers in the Chicago area. Lamb seems much, much more popular.
It could happen in the US. I understand that North America is an outlier, but a lot of people here react to eating horse the way a devout Hindu might react to eating a cow, even if the revulsion is not coming out of a religious conviction.
Here it’s not so much that eating is the illegality, it’s slaughtering a horse for the purpose of eating it that is banned. An odd distinction, but there you have it. It’s a very strong cultural taboo here.
Realistically, if someone in a rural area slaughtered and ate a horse on their own property no one would likely know. But if it was found out, well, high likelihood the person would become a social pariah unless it was an extreme survival situation, the sort where the alternative to eating horse would be to go cannibal.