Category: pop culture

Earlier this week we noted an Australian celebrity chef’s enthusiasm for eating a “pussycat sandwhich,” but Maggie Beer isn’t the only famous Aussie who has raved about eating cats.

An Australian football (soccer) player, Tony Armstrong, spoke in glowing terms about eating cat meat in an interview with The Guardian a year ago, enthusing that it was “the yummiest.”

“We had it in the Western Desert and cooked it in a fire, wrapped in foil,” Armstrong told the newspaper. “It was like the most delicious rotisserie chicken I’ve ever had.”

Armstrong’s interviewer, Sian Cain, the Guardian’s deputy culture editor for Australia, didn’t bat an eye or consider the answer worthy of a follow-up question. She just moved on, asking him if rising early for “breakfast telly” was as difficult as keeping in shape for football.

Armstrong consumed the cat meat for his television show, Eat The Invaders, which casts it as an attempt to “turn our unwanted ecological trash into desirable culinary gold.”

That’s what the life of a cat is casually referred to in certain mainstream segments of Australian culture: “unwanted ecological trash.”

As we noted in our post about Beer’s “pussycat sandwich,” the casual way this is talked about in Australia provides a window into the way some people there think about animal life in general and felines in particular.

Not all of them, of course. There are lots of people for whom the idea of eating intelligent companion animals is extremely disturbing. But the idea is widespread enough to make it onto mainstream Australian television without much of an uproar, undoubtedly because Australians are constantly told felines — not industrialization, pollution, pesticides, traffic collisions, man-made environmental hazards, and habitat loss — are almost solely responsible for declining populations of native fauna.

When the choice is between modifying our own behavior or blaming animals who cannot speak for themselves, it’s always easier to shift the blame than to, say, derail development projects or outlaw the use of harmful chemicals.

Just look at the decades-long controversy involving the weedkiller Roundup despite the damage it does to other plants, animals and the people working directly with the substance. Despite successful lawsuits on behalf of cancer patients and evidence that chemicals in the herbicide cause cancer, the EPA says it’s safe. Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides are widely used in Australia as well, but that fact is rarely raised in discussions about protecting native fauna and flora.

In a promo for Eating the Invaders, after blaming “colonial ancestors” for introducing non-native species and repeating the claim that cats kill 3 billion animals per year in Australia (an assertion for which there is no evidence), Armstrong casts himself as a crusader righting ecological wrongs.

“But what if we could help,” he asks in a voiceover, “by reimagining this problem as a tasty solution?”

In the series, Armstrong works with chef Vince Trim and “artist and curator” Kirsha Kaechele, who credits herself with staging “immersive feasts [that] transform invasive species into art.”

Kaechele says she has no qualms about eating intelligent domesticated animals.

“In some cases you should and could eat it into eradication,” Kaechele says.

Just as there is no hard evidence that cats are the primary force behind species extinction, there is no data to support the idea that randomly killing and eating cats has any positive impact on species survival.

But eating cats isn’t just about saving the world, Kaechele explains. It’s about aesthetics as well.

“In these feasts,” she says, “every element has to be art.”

By that she means she fashions cutlery, centerpieces and containers from the deceased animals.

Kaechele is no stranger to controversy. As an amateur troll, she’s known for attention-grabbing stunts. She’s faced legal complaints for opening an Australian lounge/art gallery that admitted women only, “so men feel as excluded as possible,” and attended one of her subsequent hearings with 20 female supporters who dressed like her and moved in sync with her.

The appearance was “performance art,” she claimed. The judge disagreed, calling it a disrespectful display. Kaechele was also blamed for gentrifying a New Orleans neighborhood after Hurricane Katrina, snapping up and later allegedly abandoning five properties and allowing them to decay. They were subsequently taken over by squatters while Kaechele was MIA, presumably globetrotting and enlivening people’s drab existences by “transforming them into art.”

“Women are better than men in every respect,” Kaechele says in one video, echoing the provocateur Dick Masterson’s assertion that “men are better than women.”

The difference is that Masterson is a character created by a comedian. Whether individual people find his act amusing or not, Masterson performs for an audience of men and women who are well aware his schtick is tongue in cheek. Kaechele may or may not believe what she’s saying, but one thing she’s not doing is comedy. No one’s laughing.

She’s a deeply unserious person who shouldn’t be anywhere near any conversations about conservation.

As for Trim, he can’t bring himself to admit he’s cooking cats. To him, they’re no different than anything else in his fridge or pantry.

“It’s really exciting to be using a lot of these invasive ingredients that we have,” he said.

It’s one thing to consider the possibility that species like cats are signficant drivers of native species extinction, and another to prove they are measurable contributors compared to the hundreds of ways human behavior impacts animal life.

But you have to be really far up your own ass to keep a straight face while claiming you’re saving the world by eating cats, and even more divorced from reality to characterize it as a form of artistic expression.

Perhaps most concerning, telling people that cats are “yummy” could inspire others to try it for themselves, and turning it into a trend would be an entirely new level of barbarism.

Say what you will about people who participate in China’s infamous Yulin dog meat festival. At least they plainly admit they eat dogs and cats because they like the taste without clinging to any pretense that they’re creating high art or saving the planet.