Mess with my animals and you die. And I am not alone. Animal cruelty shocks a lot of people. You don’t have to be a bunny-hugger or eat lentil burgers to get a blinding rage at witnessing animal cruelty.
Here in Cape Town, animal abuse is currently receiving the kind of publicity that makes the folks from Cape Town Tourism quiver in their Diesels, RayBan Aviators slipping on the stress-induced facial sweat. Dogs and cats are being decapitated. Strung up with piano wire. Subjected to a firecracker-up-the-butt.
The kind of stories one does not like hearing. Apart from the droning voice of John Maytham, nothing gets me to hit the “off” button like another story on a horse found with its ears chopped off.
Savages. Gangsters. High on drugs. No normal people would do this, none.
Agree.
But here I want to tell some famous foodie folk that they are complicit in animal abuse. Them and there marketers and promoters and directors and editors.
Because there is one thing I can’t stand about this modern, smug and pretentious foodie culture and that is this “ah-well, if we eat it we must kill it, so it is only honourable to kill the animal in-front of the TV cameras so I do my duty and show everyone where food comes from”.
So there we have Gordon Ramsay, Prince of Ponces. Fresh from the sunbed, he grips a writhing live eel and with the other hand drives a nail through its head, ripping the skin off while the thing is still living.
Jamie Oliver, fresh from another jerk-off session behind the sushi-bar, slits a lamb’s throat for the TV audience, apparently to be in one with this culinary obsession.
Acid-head Anthony Bourdain grins smugly as some Oriental nip places a fish in-front of him, the poor thing sliced and filleted so that it’s brain is still alive so the fish can see Bourdain eating the thing.
Look, I’m not suggesting all those screwed-up teenagers declawing Dachshunds are watching the food channels on satellite TV. But exactly what kind of society are we promoting by endorsing the grisly treatment of living animals by foodie programmes?
I eat meat. Lots of it. I eat foie gras. I choose to live on the separate divide between animals and humans, and I’ll probably end up having my gonads chomped off by a Charolais calf when I get to heaven.
But fobbing animal cruelty off as entertainment just because it satisfies the sycophantic celebrity lust of foodie personalities, this is disturbing.
Cut it out. We are bad to the bone already.
Enjoyed this article?
Subscribe and never miss a post again.
Well said, Emile. You forgot about Sunday Times food writer AA Gill shooting a baboon to see what it was like to kill a primate.
I flipping hate Jamie, Gordon and Anthony – all riding along to fame on other folks’ hard work and $…