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Italian TV celeb sacked for giving cat stew recipe
Beppe Bigazzi upsets animal lovers by saying cat is ‘better than chicken or rabbit’
An Italian TV celebrity has caused outrage, and been dropped from his show, after he gave viewers a recipe for stewed cat. Beppe Bigazzi, a 77-year-old consumer affairs journalist, cookery writer and panelist for 10 years on La Prova del Cuoco, the Italian version of Ready Steady Cook, said cat was: "Better than chicken, rabbit or pigeon."
The white-haired and perma-tanned presenter refused to apologise to viewers after he was urged to make amends during the commercial break, while TV channel RAI's switchboards were immediately jammed with callers complaining, and animal rights groups issued protesting statements.
Bigazzi's gaffe was made during a discussion of how cat had been eaten in lean times after the Second World War. He claimed that far from being a last-resort meal, boiled cat - or gatto in umido - was one of the "great dishes" of his native Valdarno region in Tuscany. Cat meat should be soaked in spring water for three days before being eaten, he said, adding: "What comes out is a delicacy. Many a time I've eaten its white meat."
The head of the Italian society for the protection of animals said that killing cats was illegal, and a junior government minister called for a criminal investigation on the grounds of incitement to mistreat animals, saying it was "absolutely unheard of for a public service broadcaster to tell people how delicious cats are to eat".
Meanwhile, Bigazzi tried to back-pedal – though not, perhaps, wholeheartedly. He claimed he had been only joking, but added: "Mind you, I wasn't joking all that much. In the 1930s and 1940s, when I was a boy, people certainly did eat cat in the countryside around Arezzo."
And there may be some truth in his claims: inhabitants of the northern city of Vincenza are known as 'cat-eaters' ('magnagati'), while some Italian butchers sell rabbits with their heads left on so customers can be sure they’re not buying felines. ·
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Just wanted to say that people all over the world eat things that others may think is odd everyday. We eat pig butt aka ham, bacon. But someone in some place on the other side of the world may think thats disgusting and not even try it. As far as Vegetarians eatting things and "not killing" it, think again. Everything that grows is living. Even your lettuce. You have to "kill it" to harvest it from the ground and eat it.
The real question is: What did this man's job have to do with a recipe for cat? This inability to recognize the limits of one's personal peeves is one of the many reasons why the Left inspires such a strange combination of irrational fear and ridicule. And how can anything get done in the midst of such trivial cavilling? Imagine trying to keep a group of such morbidly sensitive people on track to do anything?
Well I don't *have* to eat carrots, or fish and chips, or smoked salmon, or drink Bovril. But sometimes I do, because I like them. They are all part of the natural diet of an omnivore, and as the dominant species on the planet, and a sentient being to boot, I have the right to chew on a leg of anything I feel will hit the spot. I you want to be veggie, and take you vitamin B12 supplements, iron supplements, and be generally disadvantaged by not consuming co-enzyme Q10 direct in your meat, and having to manufacture it all in your liver, which only then finds its way to the mitochondria powering every muscle and live cell in your body, then go ahead. It is a free country in that respect.
No-one has to eat animals at all, cats or dogs or sheep or pigs. The millions of vegetarians around the world survive very well in good health without killing anything.
Cat is first class protein, and can be tasty if prepared well. The Chinese have been doing it for millenia. Dog is better, more flavour and better texture, again the Chinese and Koreans have been eating dog for time-out-of-mind. Let us be a little more tolerant. Who are we to judge the Italians, Chinese, and Koreans? This is a clear hands-across-the-continents moment of true gastronomic global brotherhood. So long as they are killed humanely, and do not suffer, there can be nothing wrong with it. When times are hard poor people need all the protein they can get, after all humans are more important than quadrupeds. Horse is good too, the French enjoy it.