A nonsensical campaign by an apparently American animal-rights outfit, which is outraged that people should consider eating guinea-pigs, reported by Metro.
On Wikipedia it says:
They originated in the Andes, and studies based on biochemistry and hybridization suggest they are domesticated descendants of a closely related species of cavy such as Cavia aperea, C. fulgida or C. tschudii, and therefore do not exist naturally in the wild.[1][2] The guinea pig plays an important role in the folk culture of many Indigenous South American groups, especially as a food source, but also in folk medicine and in community religious ceremonies.[3] Since the 1960s, efforts have been made to increase consumption of the animal outside South America.
I can’t follow this at all. Why is it OK for millions and millions of cattle to be made into hamburgers, and OK for the French to eat frogs’ legs, and OK for people to shoot far more grouse than they can personally consume, but Not-OK for people (even those of recent Andean extraction) to eat guinea-pigs?
Could it be simply because guinea-pigs are cute?
Personally I think they’re as boring as any other subspecies bred since time immemorial for food; little furry Holsten-Frisians, that’s what they are. They are rotten pets because they are so desperately dim and irretrievably tedious.
If one wants a rodent as a pet (they have advantages and disadvantages) then I’d recommend a rat. They’re alert, intelligent and can be trained to do all kinds of things (a friend of mine, recently given a litter of 9-day-old orphan rats by the council’s workmen, who found them in a rat-bunker under the car-park they were remaking and couldn’t bring themselves to kill them, is hoping, once they are able to feed themselves and he can get some sleep, to train them to retrieve guitar plectrums from underneath furniture).
The other advantage of a pet rat is that only a starving 18th-century naval midshipman is ever likely to want to eat it.
As serial-film-star-inpregnator John F Kennedy once said:-
“Ask not about animal rights: rather, ask if you have eaten the right animal.”
Sorry, i meant him to be an “impregnator”.
Not “impersonator”.
He said a number of rather mysterious things. I suspect that he made most of them up as he went along. There was all that stuff about the ‘other thing’. And then there was the doughnut affair.
This is why I worry about poor Mr. Obama; Americans do seem to have the habit of shooting any President whom they can’t personally understand.
Well, at least they now have one who can correctly pronounce the word “Nuclear”.
We count our blessings, don’t we?