Cougar?!
Americans are strange.
Cougar is like pork. Very good. Especially good canned in a pressure cooker. I do raw pack method.
If in fact he eats it, it's very rare. Mostly Indians eat bear. While I've never eaten it I have met a couple who have. They say it's very gamey and greasy. I've even met Indians who won't eat it because of taste.
Horse is supposed to taste very good. Met very few who have tasted it. They all liked it.
More common oddities is squirrel.
In reading the comments, my info might be wrong on bear.
Horse is served pretty commonly in Switzerland. I had it when i was there. Yes it was good, and it was very lean.
I ate horse when I went to Belgium. It's very good
Try Belgian Blue meat, if you're still there.
Fried or grilled tree rat (squirrel) is pretty good, but there isn't much meat on them.
Had horse in Iceland and mink whale. The horse was fucking awsome we need to start eating horse here no joke
I've had Zebra, which is what I imagine horse tastes like. All the sweet n sour sauce in the world can't make that good.
horse tends to be.....sweet? idk how to explain it. its like a sweeter thicker beef like stuff. ive only ever had it because this guy i worked with was a muslim and brought in some really questionable food and one of the ones he shared with me he said it was camel but im 90% sure it was horse because where the hell do you even get camel in Indiana?
Mmmmmm... fooood.
It will always be tough to compare because it can be tough to cook everything to spec, in the moment. Not all filet mignon are the same quality. There might also be better ways of preparing dog or whatever animal that you may not be privy to.
A wild boar can taste quite different, too, and usually, imo, better than any pork from the store.
That being said...
Cougar is decent... all the big cats taste about the same. Bear can be better, imo. Not always. There is a difference in taste between the Kodiak fish eating bear and the berry eating bears of Denali. Bear jerkey is pretty decent trail food.
I ate cougar/mountain lion in Colorado and bear in Alaska.
I've kinda lost track of all the stuff I went out of my way to try. Coyote and dog are both meh. I think of it as "the Grey meat". I had dog and bat in the South Pacific, Coyote in New Mexico.
Cat meat is better than dog, but I felt weird eating it. Not as good as big cat. Both the dog and cat were served with bones which... wasn't to my liking.
Alligator is actually pretty good in garlic butter. You can get it all over Louisiana.
Snake isn't that bad, either, though the capture and preparation is definitely minus points. I had some fer de lance, once... "for protection". I had rattlesnake in something similar to that butter sauce for alligators.
Darwin was really into eating his discoveries and I always thought it would be a wasted opportunity not to try random stuff.
There is an exotic meat market near me, that I've tried many things from. Of all the those meats, I actually find my favorite to be bison mixed with beef into burgers. Honorable mention are the bobcat sausages.
The best place to hunt and eat is New Zealand. You don't need tags or have limits for feral sheep, deer or pig. They're fat and healthy.
Turduckens are pretty exotic, if you think about it.
I had something similar in the middle east, once. There is apparently some mythological recipe about a camel stuffed with lamb, stuffed with chickens, stuffed with a bunch of other stuff. The version we were served did not have include a camel, but was basically a Middle Eastern Turducken.
It was the only decent thing I ate in the Middle East. I generally hated their food and they always ruined coffee with cardomime.
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