Originally posted by Enchantress
OMG - do people really eat that? Why? Do they not have pets, too in the Philippines?
Check out some histories of British daily life during WWII. You'll find that cats, commonly referred to as "roofrats," were regularly eaten to supplement the extreme rationing of meat. I've heard that cats actually had to be brought into the country after WWII, since their population had been so severely depleted, but I've no confirmation of this.
The loathing to eat dog and catmeat really is just cultural, isn't it? It's estimated that dogs became companions of humans as much as 10,000 years ago in Europe, while cats achieved that once they proved so successful in ridding Egypt's grain stock of their mice plagues roughly 4,000 years ago. Both animals were grafted into the human tree of affection in Central and South America after European conquerors appeared. (Ironically, a very accepted modern cultural theory is that the downfall of the various native American cultures was really achieved by the diseases that European domesticated animals carried. The Europeans had developed immunities through long exposure, and the native Americans completed lacked this.) Many Asian cultures never developed symbiotic relationships with cats or dogs. Hence: more food.
If this sounds unpersonal, it isn't. I know I couldn't eat catmeat unless it was represented to me as something else. Something almost cannibalistic about it--after all, our cats are part of our family.
