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53
at once attract the attention of the Sanitary Inspector. No horseflesh has been
seized in the Borough of Stepney since its inception nearly ten years ago.
With respect to horseflesh sold as catsmeat, there are in the Borough 35 purveyors
of this article, 14 of whom sell in shops only. 3 have rounds only, i.e., hawk it in the
street or call from door to door, 13 have a shop and round, while 5 sell it on stalls in
market places. These retailers sell on an average about 7 tons of catsmeat every
week, including about 30 horse tongues.
In a certain newspaper, it was stated that in Whitechapel within a short
distance of Aldgate Station, there are several shops where horseflesh is sold for human
food. There is of course no shop in the East End of London licensed to sell horseflesh
as human food, and to sell it for anything but for human food a license is not
necessary. Curiously enough, there are only 3 catsmeat shops in the whole of the
Whitechapel district, which includes the parishes of Whitechapel, Mile End New
Town, Spitalfields, etc. There is therefore less catsmeat sold in this part than in any
other part of the Borough for the following reasons:—
1. The high proportion of Jews, relatively, to the rest of the
population. Jews do not as a rule keep cats. When they do, they do not
often feed them with catsmeat. Jews are great fish eaters, and the fish
heads and entrails are given to the cats instead of, or in addition to, the
catsmeat. I found this to be the case in other parts of the Borough where
streets have recently been occupied by Jews. The trade in catsmeat in
these streets has practically disappeared.
2. The great number of model buildings in this area. Fewer cats are
kept in model buildings than in houses. The result has been that the
catsmeat trade has disappeared almost entirely, in the Whitechapel
District.
In other parts of the Borough the cause of the decline of the trade has been
unemployment. Purveyors of catsmeat, who had occupied the same catsmeat shops
for many years in a part of the district where the residents are casual dock
labourers, informed me that the diminution in the sale of catsmeat has been
enormous in that part of the Borough, where there is a larger number of unemployed.
Two purveyors who had lived in the same shop for over 30 years attributed the
decline of their trade to less than one-half, entirely to this cause. As the unemployment
increased, poverty also increased, and the cats were naturally got rid of. If
there were any foundation for the statement that poor people eat catsmeat, the sale
of catsmeat would have increased in recent years, in proportion to the increase of
unemployment and poverty. This is not so. In every part of the Borough there