The practice has been known to happen in Switzerland -- in alpine farms, when the farm dog or cat died, the farmer would cook it up rather than bury it. This practice is still legal (in fact nowhere does it say you're not allowed to eat dog or cat meat), but kept hush hush.
It was also reported in some Italian cities during World War 2. Not because of the war hardships necessarily, but due to increased reporting during that time from what I understand. The citizens of Vicenza apparently are still known as cat eaters in Italy, but of course it's more of a stigma than a common every day practice.
Historically the practice became more common during periods of famine, as one might expect. For most of European history cats were seen as feral or wild animals and sometimes even as pests to an extent (associated with withcraft and evil), they only became house pets recently all things considered. In Germany in the inter-war period cats apparently became known as "roof rabbits".
But if you think that's shocking wait until you hear what we did to Egyptian mummies! (Ground them up to use in oral medication).
Yeah nevermind about the Caitlin I had a million things in my mind. Sorry about that!
I think knowing that people ate cats during famine or in historical eras or in some boondock middle of nowhere place is very different from saying it's "a delicacy in Western Europe", where eating cat meat is extremely taboo. Your text kind of makes it sound like this is some sort of currently ongoing haute cuisine trend.
I'm not saying that to defend the ethics of Western Europeans, obviously we're very selective in where we apply our empathy and cats receive a lot more empathy here than humans do sometimes. It's more so because your piece as a whole is so well written and I'd love to share it but that sentence is so flagrantly out there that it makes the whole text seem a lot less credible on the whole.
Yeah, I know about the mummies. They also used to ground them up to make a kind of paint called "mummy brown" which never, ever, technically completely dries so those paintings are still drying now, hundreds of years on.
Well, by definition it makes it a delicacy in Western Europe -- a rare and perhaps unusual food item, located in a given geographic area. I can't speak as to whether it has a fine taste lol.
It's good to make people struggle with their assumptions and I've always written with this in mind. It's a learning opportunity and we are proof of it in this comment chain.
Part 2 of this series has received 500 views so far and there have been no complaints yet about this part (I think your comment is more of a concern than a complaint) so you can safely share it around and people will just gloss over it if they're not ready to think about it 😁
The point I'm trying to make fundamentally is that including vague and largely untrue stuff like this makes your writing less convincing, which is a shame since you write about important things. Also I'm not sure if "Western Europeans eat cats (in extremely rare apocryphal cases I'm speculating about)!" is as much of an own as you think it is, since there actually are places in the world, not in Western Europe, where eating cat meat was fairly common, although it has become a lot more taboo in the past 10-20 years or so. Obviously what animals we consider worth eating and what animals we consider worth sparing is more a matter of culture than anything with any sort of ethical consistency, and typically "group X eats this animal that we don't eat" is mostly an expression of xenophobia in any case. But to a Western European, reading this text and coming across "eating cats is a delicacy in Western Europe" just makes it sounds like you're uninformed, and it makes me as a reader wonder how much of the rest of the text is based on similar kinds of conjecture. I'm happy to leave it at that, since you clearly don't agree.
The New World Disorder of Bush The Elder, First Butcher Of Baghdad, was gangsters in the rubble, “in Haiti (and elsewhere), “gangs” provide basic community services, such as security or the distribution of food and water.”
It's so much easier to influence a country if the central government is kept weak and the only opposition ends up being localized small groups instead isn't it?
Hiya Crit for short, this is interesting. Have you read Nancy Turner Banks? She argues that the "HIV" label was used by Imperialists in South Africa (as well as in deprived Hispanic and Black areas of the US) to mask the effects of being forced to work in dust filled diamond and gold mines (as well as the effects of deliberately flooding the area with crack cocaine).
Caitlin I really appreciate your newsletter and find it very informative. With that being said, WHERE in Western Europe are people eating CATS?
I assume Caitlin is an autocorrect typo 😁
The practice has been known to happen in Switzerland -- in alpine farms, when the farm dog or cat died, the farmer would cook it up rather than bury it. This practice is still legal (in fact nowhere does it say you're not allowed to eat dog or cat meat), but kept hush hush.
It was also reported in some Italian cities during World War 2. Not because of the war hardships necessarily, but due to increased reporting during that time from what I understand. The citizens of Vicenza apparently are still known as cat eaters in Italy, but of course it's more of a stigma than a common every day practice.
Historically the practice became more common during periods of famine, as one might expect. For most of European history cats were seen as feral or wild animals and sometimes even as pests to an extent (associated with withcraft and evil), they only became house pets recently all things considered. In Germany in the inter-war period cats apparently became known as "roof rabbits".
But if you think that's shocking wait until you hear what we did to Egyptian mummies! (Ground them up to use in oral medication).
Yeah nevermind about the Caitlin I had a million things in my mind. Sorry about that!
I think knowing that people ate cats during famine or in historical eras or in some boondock middle of nowhere place is very different from saying it's "a delicacy in Western Europe", where eating cat meat is extremely taboo. Your text kind of makes it sound like this is some sort of currently ongoing haute cuisine trend.
I'm not saying that to defend the ethics of Western Europeans, obviously we're very selective in where we apply our empathy and cats receive a lot more empathy here than humans do sometimes. It's more so because your piece as a whole is so well written and I'd love to share it but that sentence is so flagrantly out there that it makes the whole text seem a lot less credible on the whole.
Yeah, I know about the mummies. They also used to ground them up to make a kind of paint called "mummy brown" which never, ever, technically completely dries so those paintings are still drying now, hundreds of years on.
Well, by definition it makes it a delicacy in Western Europe -- a rare and perhaps unusual food item, located in a given geographic area. I can't speak as to whether it has a fine taste lol.
It's good to make people struggle with their assumptions and I've always written with this in mind. It's a learning opportunity and we are proof of it in this comment chain.
Part 2 of this series has received 500 views so far and there have been no complaints yet about this part (I think your comment is more of a concern than a complaint) so you can safely share it around and people will just gloss over it if they're not ready to think about it 😁
The point I'm trying to make fundamentally is that including vague and largely untrue stuff like this makes your writing less convincing, which is a shame since you write about important things. Also I'm not sure if "Western Europeans eat cats (in extremely rare apocryphal cases I'm speculating about)!" is as much of an own as you think it is, since there actually are places in the world, not in Western Europe, where eating cat meat was fairly common, although it has become a lot more taboo in the past 10-20 years or so. Obviously what animals we consider worth eating and what animals we consider worth sparing is more a matter of culture than anything with any sort of ethical consistency, and typically "group X eats this animal that we don't eat" is mostly an expression of xenophobia in any case. But to a Western European, reading this text and coming across "eating cats is a delicacy in Western Europe" just makes it sounds like you're uninformed, and it makes me as a reader wonder how much of the rest of the text is based on similar kinds of conjecture. I'm happy to leave it at that, since you clearly don't agree.
The New World Disorder of Bush The Elder, First Butcher Of Baghdad, was gangsters in the rubble, “in Haiti (and elsewhere), “gangs” provide basic community services, such as security or the distribution of food and water.”
It's so much easier to influence a country if the central government is kept weak and the only opposition ends up being localized small groups instead isn't it?
"Woke" terrorists boiling heads should be the US flag
Hiya Crit for short, this is interesting. Have you read Nancy Turner Banks? She argues that the "HIV" label was used by Imperialists in South Africa (as well as in deprived Hispanic and Black areas of the US) to mask the effects of being forced to work in dust filled diamond and gold mines (as well as the effects of deliberately flooding the area with crack cocaine).
'HIV' is greed not a virus.
https://jowaller.substack.com/p/aids-opium-diamonds-and-empire-by?utm_source=publication-search