You could feed a family of four for a month on a shire horse, surely

It was required viewing when I was a lad to watch as old Champ would lead his herd to safety from the rustlers or thunder them down the valley to stampede over the black-hatted bad guys in the TV series named after the famous, caramel-coloured nag.

Champ and I were true pals back in the sixties. Which is, I now understand from this week’s revelations regarding horse meat in hamburgers, why the British (and the Americans and Irish) do not eat horses while the French, Belgians and other nations gamely nibble away on a Shetland fetlock whenever they get the chance (or as this paper revealed this week following our own investigation, gnashing on bits of a New Forest Pony).

It seems that we see horses as companions and not just beasts of burden, which is why we don’t snack away on them, nor dogs, cats and hamsters, although the latter would make an ideal appetiser.

How much we consider it against the grain, old chap, to nibble on a nag was proved this week when the fact small bits of dead horses had found themselves into various burgers in British supermarkets and you would have though they had been stuffing bits of humans between the buns.

Forget helicopter crashes, hostage raids in Algeria and gun laws in the US, the British media was fixated on how Shergar had managed to find its way into the most popular tea time meal of the nation.

Oh it wasn’t the fact horse meat was bad for us, we were assured by politicians leaping onto the bandwagon to catch votes, but we had been betrayed because we should expect what was in the tin to be what the outside of the tin said it was – or in this case the burger wrapper.

To which I say: horse flesh. The nation’s press knew full well it was the fact we had discovered we might have been grazing on the stars of War Horse that was the problem, not whether the labelling was suspect.

Of course the reality, as this paper also explained on Thursday, was that horses and ponies from Britain, especially such spots as the New Forest, have been sent to the dinner plate in mass numbers for decades. It’s just that we never wanted to ask in case we were told the truth.

Just where did we think all those New Forest ponies rounded up each year were being shipped off to? The Home Counties so that over-pampered little Annabels and Jemimas could trot them around the paddock? Hardly. In fact, some 200 New Forest ponies each year are shipped off to the abattoirs, the meat then destined for European food factories and ultimately the dinner plates of Paris, Brussels and Antwerp.

A few, we know suspect, also made their way to meat processing outlets and then accidentally into products for the British market.

Bang then goes our far-fetched thoughts that those lovely foals we see skipping across spring-lit heather-strewn New Forest tracks each year end up gambolling their days away in some lush paddock before heading off to the retirement home for much-loved Dobbins (remember Folly Foot Farm?).

It may not be the glue factory, but it is still a grisly end. But such is the real world.

Now the lid has been lifted on the whole horse-flesh casserole, so to speak, heaven knows where this will lead. After all, what do we really think lurks in some of those cheaper meat pies that are presented in ‘own brand’ wrappers.

And the clues are there if we choose to look. Muffin the Mule? I think it’s time we asked a bit more about what they are putting into our pastries these days.