[m i a o w] the cat

I eat meat. But I try to be a feral-aqua-a-tarian. So that means (as well as the seafood I can’t give up) I eat kangaroo and wild rabbit. I’m not saying that this has to make sense to anybody else. But I was speaking to E tonight (my frenetic 1-month-ahead-of-me preggo friend) and she said she’d started eating meat and was actually cooking a roast as we spoke. I started to drool. The thing is, I really LIKE meat. I like lamb chops, and roast beef and ham and all that stuff. But I can’t eat it, because it drowns me in guilt. Guilt about how animals are treated, and guilt about how they’re killed. Wild rabbits are a pest, and kangaroos are also in plague proportions and are mostly used for pet meat. Both of them get to bounce through their lives before their fates are decided. And so I don’t feel so bad about occasionally chomping on them.

So I thought I would hunt around for some meat which, although it was not feral and did not bounce in its lifetime, had a happy, free ranging life and a quick, non-traumatic death. There was one certification that I found which fitted my criteria. The Humane Choice Standard. From the Humane Society International.
“Hooray!” I thought, “This is something I can track down and when I have a drooling urge to eat meat, this is the way I’ll go.”

It seems, however, that fate has other ideas. I can only find two companies in Australia - Fernleigh Free Range and Spencer Brook Farms - who are listed as having the Humane Choice Standard certification. The former has a website that is interesting but vague on the topic of meat, the latter doesn’t appear to have a web presence at all. Goddamnit. So for the moment I am thwarted. Maybe my drooling is just my body calling for protein or iron, and I can cure these in the normal way. With pasta and cheese. And crumpets.