Horse, possum and donkey meat on menu under South Australian food safety changes
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Version 0 of 1. Horse, possum, camel and donkey will be available for sale from South Australian butchers from September next year if recommended changes to food safety regulations are adopted. The SA government, which has to update the regulations by 1 September 2017, has suggested the state should adopt the Australian and New Zealand Food Standards code definition of “game meat”, which governs what wild animals may be sold commercially for human consumption. The proposed change would broaden the range of animals available at butchers to include wild horses and donkeys, as well as wild buffalo, camel, deer, pig and possum. Domestic horses, like racehorses, would still not be allowed to be sold for human consumption. Eggs, foetuses and pouch young are still off the list. Wild goats, rabbits, hare, kangaroo, wallaby and any bird that may be legally hunted can already be slaughtered and sold for human consumption in SA. A spokeswoman from SA Health said the proposed changes would not change the laws around hunting or culling protected species. “Any South Australians wanting to hunt protected species in SA would need a permit as per the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1972 legislation,” she said. The move would make SA only the second jurisdiction to allow for the local production and sale of horse meat, after Western Australia adopted the broader national standards in 2009. The proposed change has been opposed by the Animal Justice party. “The newly proposed game industries are particularly obnoxious because they produce meats that people don’t even like,” convenor Geoff Russell told the Advertiser. According to the Humane Society, about 100,000 horses are slaughtered annually in Australia. Of those about 8,400 are processed through one of two abattoirs licensed to slaughter horses for export – Samex Peterborough in South Australia and Meramist in Caboolture, Queensland. The rest are processed by one of 33 knackeries and sold as pet meat. A Perth butcher, Vince Garreffa, received death threats from animal rights groups after he received ministerial permission to sell horse meat in 2010 and joked that his Inglewood butchery would “be known as the horse whisperers”. “You just whisper, ‘Can I have a kilo of horse meat please’,” he told Fairfax media. He later told the Courier Mail he was doing a roaring trade among French and Italian migrants, who say it “tastes of home.” Legally caught possums and wallabies can already be sold as game meat in Tasmania. Wallaby is said to taste like kangaroo, only “milder”, but possum has proved harder to describe, earning the qualified approval of one Tasmanian producer who said it was “quite a different meat.” The proposed SA regulations are open for public consultation until February. |