The ongoing horsemeat scandal has opened up a hugely complicated web stretching across the EU, highlighting the difficulty of tracing the origins of the meat on sale in this country. Even now, almost a month after it was announced that horse could be in beef products, no one is entirely sure of how the horses entered the food chain. There are other big questions, too: here are four that need answers:
• The matter of dodgy horse passports – which I wrote about last month – is something that still hasn’t been fully investigated. It has now emerged that up to 7,000 unauthorised passports have been in circulation in the UK since 2008, highlighting the chaotic state of the passport system. (The story of Charlie the ‘ghost’ cob, who according to official documents was slaughtered in 2012, but who was in fact discovered wandering the streets in Ireland, shows just one example of the problems with the current system).
• It might well be true that a human would have to eat 500 burgers to receive an equivalent human dose of bute.
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