In Britain the Celts were extremely practical in their ritual sacrifices even - for the most part these were elderly animals that would be eaten anyway, and the parts used as offerings are heads and lower limbs, not the good parts.
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The slaughter of an animal represented a lot of very precious protein. In the case of the cattle prehistoric Britain had, you're looking at roughly 300-400lbs of meat and bone and edible organs. By comparison their sheep might yield 20-30lbs.
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So you're not wasting any of this meat if you can possibly help it - you're going to dry it, salt it, smoke it, whatever it takes to make sure that all of that protein stays good.
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And the only times young young cattle or sheep would be eaten would be when a chieftain wanted to engage in conspicuous consumption. You'd have to be rich to be able to discard the economic benefits of the animal's life.
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Pigs are a whole nother story incidentally, they seem to have been almost solely a prestige meat, quite possibly because a live pig has no economic value. They don't grow wool or plow and you can't milk em.
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So pigs and horses both fell into the category of "animals kept by the wealthy" quite possibly. But elderly horses do not appear to have been a high status meat, unlike pork.
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Well and technically you can milk a pig, I have in fact milked an extremely cooperative sow. But I'm guessing most sows are not that laid back.
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BUT I DIGRESS. Anyway. Animal ag has changed over time and we'd need to hit up someone familiar with medieval ag to talk to us about how things like age at slaughter changed from the fall of Rome through the Renaissance.
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But as a rule of thumb, nobody eats an animal that's more valuable alive. The thing about the world we live in today is that most livestock has no economic value except as meat.
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This is, however, a pretty recent change all things considered. For most of human history we didn't keep so many animals that we could afford to just wastefully eat them before they reached full adulthood.
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There is limited evidence but early Christianity was super against horse meat because they thought it was pagan shenanigans.
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Replying to @AdmiralHip @NeolithicSheep
And given high status horse burials and some written evidence, younger horses were used for ritual food and burial sometimes.
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Replying to @AdmiralHip @NeolithicSheep
Young adult horses I should say.
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