Meow, meow, meow, meow…

So have you encountered the uproar over chef Beppe Begazzi’s recent comments on the Italian version of Ready Steady Cook?  He recommended cat as a “succulent dish,” offering casserole preparation tips and what-not.  A bunch of humorless malcontents with miserable lives flooded the station with complaints, the station told Begazzi to apologize, he refused, and now he’s suspended indefinitely.

I hope he never apologizes.

I’m never going to be a “cat person.”  Still, I love my cat more than I ever thought I would love a cat.  I was horribly bothered when he went walkabout.  I still think of that a couple of times a week and consider how glad I am that he’s home.

But, dig:  he’s a little mammal, and mammals are edible.  That he’s of a species helpful to civilization and useful for companionship doesn’t preclude that species’ use for food (see also horse and dog).

Taboos against such are purely cultural, and therefore awfully hazy under any objective scrutiny.  There’s nothing any more inherently wrong with slaughtering, dressing, cooking, and eating a cat than there is with doing so with a cow or a pig.

And, um, oh yeah:  it was a joke.

This excessive reaction is from all of the same folks who went into sustained shrieking hysterics over Bonsai Kitten—in fact, the folks who made that site funny in the first place.  They’re the same kinds of people I hoped to rile with a stand-up bit I once wrote about delegging cats:

• Do you take the rears and put a wheel on his tummy, or do you take the fronts and put a wheel on his chin?
• Or do you take all of them?  “Stay.”  Heh.
• It’s kind of a ripoff if you have him declawed and then delegged, isn’t it?

Sick?  Yeah, a bit.  Funny?  Yeah, to an awful lot of us.  Relax and try to keep a sense of proportion, cat people.  Or how about putting all of that energy into stopping human trafficking?

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