Taboos are psychologically powerful since they affect inescapable features of human experience: diet, reproduction, sexual behaviour, menstruation, defecation and so on. You note that taboos are often accompanied by a great deal of hypocrisy. Various sexual practices denounced as unthinkable turn out to be fairly common, and as for eating horses – well, you have to wonder whether the British were really as naive as the newspapers make out. Surely, you ask yourself, people must have thought there was something a bit dodgy about the meat in a fairground hamburger; and surely they must have wondered about the export of all those British ponies to foreign abattoirs. Where did Shergar go?