tom d. friedman wrote:
better not let the local chinese restaurant get a hold of those pics, as well as it's airport location.
I've spent some time in China and never seen cat on the menu. Looks like you may have to go to the UK to get it instead!
Quote:
Historically cats have been eaten in the West. Tales of cat-eating are nothing new and can be found in Charles Dickens’ "The Pickwick Papers" (1836/7) where Sam Weller tells Mr. Pickwick that he’s heard about pies made from kittens being sold on the London streets as ordinary meat pies. In 1885 an English newspaper reported the story of a woman convicted of trapping and butchering cats and selling them to people as rabbit meat.
Le Monde Illustre, April 1871. During the Siege of Paris (Franco-Prussian War) market stalls did a thriving business in cat, dog and rat meat.
During the siege, with no food to spare, even the animals would have been starving.
This recipe for "Roast Cat as It Should Be Prepared" is from Ruperto de Nola, Libro de Cozina, 1529: Take a cat that should be plump: and cut its throat, and once it is dead cut off its head, and throw it away for this is not to be eaten; for it is said that he who eats the brains will lose his own sense and judgement. Then skin it very cleanly, and open it and clean it well; and then wrap it in a clean linen cloth and bury it in the earth where it should remain for a day and a night; then take it out and put it on a spit; and roast it over the fire, and when beginning to roast, baste it with good garlic and oil, and when you are finished basting it, beat it well with a green branch; and this should be done until it is well roasted, basting and beating; and when it is roasted carve it as if it were rabbit or kid and put it on a large plate; and take the garlic with oil mixed with good broth so that it is coarse, and pour it over the cat and you can eat it for it is a good dish.
Cat has also been eaten in Britain. During wartime rationing, cats found their way into "rabbit" stews/pies and hence earned themselves the nickname "roof-rabbit". With so many city strays and pets abandoned by bombed out families, cats were a substitute for rabbit. A former colleague whose father was in the butchery trade during that time told me that butchers sometimes kept cats as ratters; the cat later ended up being sold as "rabbit". The rationale was simple - a surplus of homeless cats living off of vermin, plus the fact that the supply of wild rabbit from the countryside had been suspended. The following rhyme summed up the keeping of cats in peace-time and the eating of them in times of hardship.
Oh kittens, in our hours of ease
Uncertain toys and full of fleas,
When pain and anguish hang o’er men,
We turn you into sausage then.
Today, pet cats in the UK are apparently stolen to satisfy the continental fur trade; the skinned carcasses have sometimes offered to butchers as "wild rabbit". A former colleague who controlled rabbits on local farms supplied wild rabbit to a local butcher. In 1993, the butcher asked him to leave the head and feet on the carcass because he had been offered skinned cat by other shooters and wanted to be sure of the true identity of the meat. Once the paws, head and tail are removed, the only way to distinguish cat from rabbit or hare is by looking at the processus hamatus of the scapula. In the cat, this should have a processus suprahamatus.
The Spanish expression "pasar gato por liebre" (to pass off a cat as a hare) and the Portuguese expression "Comprar gato por lebre" (to buy a cat as a hare) are derived from this practice and mean "to pull the wool over someone's eyes".
In one region of Europe, the traditional Christmas meal is not a turkey or a beef joint, but a cat specially fattened for the occasion. It is served stuffed and roasted. A cat rescue shelter in a French town became aware that a local man who adopted kittens from them was rearing those kittens for food, killing and eating them at six months of age. He considered them a delicacy.
As well as feeding cats to humans, Diego Rivera wrote in his memoirs "My Art, My Life: An Autobiography" of a Parisian fur dealer who fed cat flesh to his cats to make their pelts firmer and glossier.
While Western activists attempt to eradicate pet-eating, they fail to realise that the animals eaten are not "pets" but livestock. Having pets is a luxury. It is also conveniently forgotten that Western farming and slaughter methods are frequently inhumane in order to achieve high turnover. Some of the animals routinely eaten in Western cultures are considered taboo or sacred elsewhere, making Europeans and Americans appear barbaric by somebody else's standards.
"It is inappropriate for someone to denounce another country's food just because it differs from his or hers," said Korean consular staffer Sok-Bae Lee in a December 1996 interview with Ciaran Ganley of the Toronto Sun. "Eating is a result of longstanding cultural practices, not an issue of morality. In Korea, there are dogs who are bred to be pets and there are certain kinds of dogs who are bred to be used as food."
Westerners equate eating cats and dogs to cannibalism (particularly to cannibalism of children) because we are raised to think of them as family members and are attached to them as such, yet millions of unwanted cats and dogs in Western countries are either euthanized in shelters or abandoned on the streets. Is this somehow a better fate than being eaten?
RACIAL SLURS AND STEREOTYPES
Most readers will be familiar with tales of cat or dog carcasses found when Public Health officials raid an ethnic restaurant. Or tales that "ever since that ethnic family move into the street cats have been going missing". There is an entire genre of urban mythology built around ethnic restaurants and cat eating. This demonstrates a Western distrust of unfamiliar foods as well as racial stereotyping and is explored in The Role of the Cat In Urban Mythology. Some Asian individuals have encountered hostility and suspicion from new colleagues and new neighbours or may be asked an outright "They eat cats in your country don't they?"
These are racial stereotypes and racial slurs. It is wrong to lump together many countries, cultures and races as "Asians" (e.g. Indian subcontinent, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, Malaysia) or "Orientals" (Chinese, Japanese). Too many Westerners still think of Asia as one homogeneous area and not a range of countries with different cultures. An analogy would be a Japanese person assuming that, since Spain is known for its cruel bull fights, all Europeans indulge in bull-fighting. A number of Asian and Eastern religions advocate vegetarianism. Thailand and Japan are both long-term "cat loving" countries although the standards of cat care are different from Western ideals. Cats were valued there at a time when they were being tortured and killed in Europe because of their association with witchcraft.
Having heard so much conflicting information about pet-eating in Korea, I spoke to the Korean wife of a colleague. She was quite upset at the suggestion that all Koreans eat pet cats. She told me that cats are eaten, but mostly in rural areas since well-educated Koreans consider pet keeping a status symbol and sign of Westernisation. She stressed that the cats eaten are bred and bought for food, just like Westerners breed cattle for food - they are not pets. This parallels the fact that China has a specialised breed of dog raised specially for meat - the Mongolian Chinese Meat Dog (often crossed with imported St Bernard dogs to improve yield) - just as Westerners raise some rabbits for meat and other types of rabbit as pets. The "Chow" breed was a meat dog - "chow" means "food".
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you've eaten to much when your hitting the catnip instead of the booze!!
