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It is served up bubbling with a delicious aroma like no other you have smelled before. Your stomach growls in anticipation and you take a bite. Unusual and unidentifiable, you turn to your host and ask her the secret of this delicious recipe. The answer is guaranteed to shock you and quite possibly have you tearing up from the table in a rush to the bathroom before your stomach contents violently reject the reply your host has given.
The meat in question in this particular recipe is feral cat and the recipe was created by a popular Australian children's author Kaye Kessing.
Or you could try some aromatic tantalizing "Cat-erole", delicious served with a chutney sauce. The recipe for Cat-erole was first created when the author caught and skinned a feral cat and noticed how tasty the meat looked.
"I would never boil a cat - I would roast it or chop it up and saute it," says Kaye Kessing.
Kaye Kessing is unapologetic about her choice of ingredients. In fact, she is actually an animal activist, and this is why her choice of recipe calls for this particular animal.
Feral cats are in plague proportion in Australia. The cat is not native to Australia in any way and has been introduced over the past two hundred years by British settlers along with other plague animals such as toads, rabbits, dogs, rats, deer, pigs, mice and other such assorted critters.
Unfortunately, these animals take a terrible toll on the native environment - especially the fauna, which up until now has not been a food prey for any large predatory animal. Now, unique Australian critters such as Possums, Bilbys, Koalas and Wallabies are under threat by feral cats that are wiping whole colonies out of these endangered animals.
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I must admit I chuckled when
By Seth God of Chaos, September 24, 2007 at 17:50I must admit I chuckled when reading this. Talk about a novel approach to an all too common solution! Feral cats in Australia are by no means the only ones causing species declines. In North America the estimated native bird deaths are about 2 million per year solely due to feral cats or cats who are let outside by their owners. A lot of the ornithologists in my college will tell you that if you really want to save a rare bird, you need to buy a gun and start shooting cats.
Robyn hit an interesting point, though I don't know if it's necessarily a valid one if given a little closer scrutiny. I'd find you hard pressed to come up with any reasonably active vertebrate we couldn't keep as a pet and grow to care about. I've even met a few pet octopi who had more character and obvious intelligence than a good many people I've come across.
Pigs are actually some of the cleanest and smartest of mammals if given the chance to be. The only separation of cats and dogs from them is that in the ancient past our ancestors decided one was better to eat than the other. Perhaps if dogs and cats were a heftier animal meat-wise, we'd be seeing fried cat strips topping our BLT's. Would they be CLT's then?
Regardless of this, feral cats and many other invasive species are a devil of our own invocation. Were it not for the meddling of humanity, the situation wouldn't even exist in the first place. Therefore, in the preservation of endemic wildlife and habitat, some seemingly violent measures become downright necessary. The brown tree snake problem on Guam springs to mind, though I'm sure they don't taste nearly as good as a Cajun-style cat with okra side.
I, too, have eaten kangaroo
By Robyn Stubbs, September 17, 2007 at 12:39I, too, have eaten kangaroo and I have to say, it was quite a lovely piece of meat! I don't feel one way or another about it: People who come to Canada try out bear and moose - it's all part of being a carnivore, I suppose. If kangaroo were an endangered species, however, I would have declined.
My stomach did do flips while reading parts of your story Margaret, and though I'm not a cat person, I wouldn't dream of eating one. Why not? The argument that cats are unhygienic doesn't really clinch it for me; pigs live in mud and I still eat pork! Nope, it's because in Western cultures, we treat cats and dogs like humans, life partners, if you will. We personify them and make them our best friends, which makes them totally off limits as a food source.
I could never be a farmer - if I were, I would've saved Wilbur, too.