Cats are on the Menu!

Hah! I come up with a great idea, and thankfully it is being utilized somewhere around the world! As some of you may remember from this earlier post, I suggested that our response to the overpopulation of dogs and cats in this country should be to simply EAT them. After all, animals are made of meat, and if we have too many of an animal, logic would dictate that we eat them to "thin the herds".

It's already happened in China, that the overflowing lake caused an infestation of rats, so their logical response was to catch and eat the rats. Of course, it was more of catching the rats and selling them to restaurants by the kilogram, where they'd then be killed and cooked and served as a delicacy. Nevertheless, a problem of too many animals resulted pleasantly with "eat the animals" as a solution.

So now we come to Australia. Feral cats (descendants of housecats who were left to fend for themselves) have become a huge problem in the outback. The cats are killing off all of the smaller animals in the wild, which apparently is a bad thing for the Australians. Somehow. Anyway, one woman in Alice Springs has decided to take my advice (I don't know if she got the idea from reading my blog, but I assume she did, because I didn't hear about this until after I'd posted my idea, so it must have logically come from my post) and brought forth an entry in a cooking contest which was a wild cat casserole - kind of a stew with marinated feral cat meat.

The Aborigines have been eating them for years, actually - roasting the meat over an open fire - but apparently some of the others have more refined palattes. One of the cooking contest judges reportedly had to spit out the meat in a back room because she found it "impossibly tough".

For any of your gourmets out there, here's a rundown of the recipe:

Wild Cat Casserole

The meat should be diced and fried until it is brown. Then lemon grass is to be added along with salt and pepper and three cups of quandong, which is a sweet desert fruit.

It is recommended that the dish be left to simmer for five hours before being garnished with bush plums and mistletoe berries.

Wow! Sounds like a nice holiday dish! I guess the question that's on all of your minds (or it at least WILL be after I've posed the question now) is, "So what does feral cat taste like, anyway?" Well, the report says: "The meat is said to taste like a cross between rabbit and, perhaps inevitably, chicken." I guess sounds about par for the course, a bit of rabbit for the speed and jumping talents, and chicken because - well, doesn't everything default to chicken on our primitive tastebuds?

Say what you want, PETA - fact is, I CALLED IT! Cats are on the menu, and maybe someday this recipe will travel across the Pacific to our humble nation and our humble palattes.

(Proof that I can't make this stuff up - and that I totally called it!)