Although it was adopted more than a hundred years ago, chevaline remains a rather unfamiliar word in English because the meat it refers to—horse—is not tremendously popular in either North America or England; most butcher shops will not even stock chevaline for fear that customers will be so disgusted they will stop buying the other dismembered animals, the ones that it’s “okay” to eat. This aversion to chevaline is puzzling because horsemeat is not proscribed by the Bible and is not reputed to have a bad flavour; horsemeat is cherry chevaline actually leaner than beef or pork and is safer to eat, at least in so far as horses are not prone to diseases like tuberculosis and tapeworms that cows and pigs sometimes pass on to humans. However, horses also differ from cows and pigs in that they, like dogs and cats, are usually given personal names, a custom that probably arose from people using horses for sport: they ride them, jump them, and race them, activities that would somehow seem less majestic were they performed with pigs or cows. This naming of horses is perhaps what usually spares them from the dinner table, since humans are reluctant to devour anything named Flicka, Rex, or Lady. Nonetheless, horsemeat—or chevaline—has been consumed from time to time by some gastronomes, especially in France where the word chevaline originated. The French formed this name from cheval, meaning horse, a word that derives from caballus, the Latin name for horse. Caballus is also the source of several other familiar English words. First, it developed into the Latin word caballarius, meaning horseman, which developed in Italian into cavaliere. From this Italian word, English derived both cavalry (a troop of soldiers mounted on horses) and cavalier (a disdainful or flippant attitude, often demonstrated by medieval knights who had horses when no one else did). The Latin caballarius also evolved into the Old French chivalerie, which English then adopted as chivalry; the adjective formed from this word, chivalrous, came to mean noble thanks to the belief, occasionally proven true, that knights were not mere pirates on horses.