Another guy has been arrested slaughtering a dog in Naivasha hardly a week after another guy (who I can bet was probably not the first to do so, nor was it his first dog to slaughter) was arrested doing the same dastardly deed. Haven’t these guy heard of something called in the privacy of your own home, where you can do all you want including dancing nude and slaughtering dogs without a nosy neighbor pointing the cops in your direction? Whether the meat was for sale or for personal consumption is not the issue here because no one will admit to offering dog meat for sale in Kenya.
Why I ask, as an aside, would someone one to chow down on man’s best friend? I however think that we may be making a mountain out of a mole hill (as usual) because one man’s meat is another man’s poison or so the old adage pontificates! If you recall the recent loud protests when one enterprising Kenyan decided to set up a donkey slaughter house in Naivasha (not Naivasha again!) for export (so he said) to places where they are not so full of pretenses about what they eat and after obtaining all the licenses from the authorities including building and NEMA approvals only for the same authorities to turn around and sabotage the project “in the public interest”. Was theirs a knee jerk reaction or a well calculated and well thought out reaction to an issue that had hurt the sensibilities of a populace who have probably partaken of the same donkey meat under the mistaken belief that it was beef all the while smacking their lips at the deliciousness of the punda nyama choma!
For thousands of years the Chinese have been eating all sorts of creatures including dog meat with no apparent ill effects. I hear that so long as it walks, crawls, flies or swims it is fair game for the cooking pot in China! The Chinese are also considered to be one of the longest living human beings on Earth no doubt as a result of their not too choosy life style when it comes to culinary matters! Dog probably makes a delicious meat stew as well as a tasty kebab or samosa and by the same token you would never hear of someone in China dying of hunger thanks to their keen noses for something tasty irrespective of the wrapping around it!!
Closer home when the Chinese arrived to construct ( the soon to be stripped bare of all metal) Thika Super Highway several years ago there was a hue and cry that all of a sudden there were no stray dogs in the vicinity of the area where many of the Chinese engineers and foremen lived. I don’t recall if it were Zimmerman or Kamiti or both. Was it a mere happenstance that the arrival of the Chinese and the demise of the stray dogs in that general area were a coincidence? Why in any case would anyone care for the welfare of a stray dog in their neighborhood a creature which is more famous for scaring children and women as they go about their business and fighting for scraps of food while howling loudly in the dead of night while all along these same people had been calling upon the City Council to remove the strays from their midst unless of course it was their timid and half-starved Jimmy, Simba and Tiger watchdogs, for lack of a better word that were finding their way to the Chinese wok to be garnished with some dhania, onion and soy sauce.
Was this magnanimity towards the strays as a result of competition for the dogs from local Zimmerman and Kamiti dog meat aficionados now starved of their favorite delicacy since the masters of dog delicacies had finally arrived and pitched camp in their hood and knew how (thanks to a long tradition) to entice these animals so as to turn them into a tasty dish they probably craved after the novelty of goat meat, chicken and beef had worn off? We will never know!!
Stories abound of a thriving bush meat trade in West Africa where beef, goat and chicken meat are considered expensive delicacies and where the choice available even in many upscale hotels is bush rat stew or fish stew whereas in the seedier parts of many towns your culinary fare shall probably comprise a wide variety of ape, bat, snail, porcupine, warthog, wild boar, any unidentified rodent and so on. In many parts of South & Central America, Central Africa and South East Asia, I would like to believe that no one is too squeamish about what lands on the table because let’s face it, when you have a choice between starvation and a nicely roasted vampire bat, the bat would land on a grill faster that you can think….eehww and the bigger the bat the more people it can feed.
So even as you make disgusted noises at these folk from Naivasha slaughtering and eating dog meat, rest assured that something you eat is anathema to someone else and vice versa. What you crave as a delicacy may make someone else puke at the mere thought of how it has landed on the table. It is likely that you have partaken of dog meat or donkey meat sometime or other in this great land called Kenya because after all my own brother partook of ‘agouti’ (look it up) while on a visit to Senegal under the mistaken belief that it was goat meat!!
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