After paying a public relations firm $70,000 to launch a campaign about the illegality of eating horses, Great Britain’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs might need some additional PR to silence public opinion on the matter. 

The Sun reported that DEFRA paid the PR firm Linstock 45,810 British pounds, or more than $73,000, to circulate a campaign informing travelers, the umbrella term that encompasses all nomadic people in the United Kingdom, of laws banning the consumption of their horses.

The European Union law went into effect in 2009, and it requires horse owners in the EU to microchip and obtain passports for any horses that they own. Horsemeat for human consumption is a thriving business in some parts of Europe, and this regulation was supposed to help keep track of the medications horses received, thus preventing animals treated with substances harmful to humans from ending up on the dinner table.

However, neither the travelers, nor the Brits in general, have any history of eating horsemeat. The campaign was mostly aimed at travelers, who used to rely on horses for their transportation. These days, however, fewer and fewer travelers even own horses. There have been no documented cases of travelers making meals of their horses, so the public has been a bit baffled as to why this was a necessary expenditure, especially for an agency facing a severe funding squeeze.

There are thought to be more than 30,000 travelers who live in the United Kingdom, dispersed through Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales.

While DEFRA has its own public relations team that usually deals with these matters, they outsourced the work to a firm that had “specialist knowledge and experience of working with this group.”