Home life
Good red meat
Alice Thomas Ellis
extract or something disgusting because he'd grown anaemic; and the human frame can adjust to a meatless diet. Mine has, more or less, but this is not because of conviction. I can't be bothered with butcher's meat — either buying it or cooking it. Something in the pasta line is about all I can cope with at the moment, although I do buy very little steaks for the adolescents. Adolescents, like dogs, need meat. So do cats. Cats are even more carnivorous than dogs or adolescents — or foxes. Foxes can keep body and soul together on earthworms and the contents of suburban bins, but cats need red meat. One of our cats has a passion for olives but he couldn't actually live on them. He treats them rather as human beings do — as an appetiser, except that human beings don't go down on all fours to chase the piP around when they've eaten the rest of it. Not if they're sober they don't. Puss and Cadders eat tin after tin of vile-smelling cat food — rabbit-, chicken-, liver- or beef-flavoured. but rabbit-, chicken-, liver- or beef-flavoured what? I used to fear that it might be whale meat and suffer pangs of guilt. Whales are quite as beautiful and beguiling as cats — in their own way — and I don't like the idea of the one eating the other. Now I think whaling is largely out of style in this country and I suspect that the cats are currently consum- ing horse meat. This is also upsetting since horses are not really bred for food. They put in years of work of one sort or another and it seems deeply unfair that after all that they should then be slaughtered and tin- ned.
Cows, pigs, sheep and chickens are not expected to run races or go pony-trekking before they turn up in the abattoir. I do not care to dwell on their lives and eventual deaths either, but at least they are not brought up to expect anything different. Horses have always had a lousy deal, carrying people into battle, pulling carts and jumping over barbed-wire fences, whereas cats have been pampered and cosseted all through the ages, and hardly ever expected to do a stroke of work, apart from catching rats and mice, which is in their own interests anyway if there aren't any tins of horse-meat around. They catch birds too, which is wicked but clever of them. Have you ever tried to catch a healthy bird with its wits about it? Janet's Cesare unwrapped one in her dining-room the other day. Not a pretty sight, but you can't argue with a cat. I've tried and I know. They stare at you balefully and go away and wash their whiskers, wearing an air of contempt. Then when it's dinner-time they jump on the shelf and kick a tin of cat food into the vegetable crock just to let you know what is expected of you. I don't altogether approve of their characters, but they've been well and truly spoiled for centuries, and it's too late to do anything about it now.
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