WHAT DO YOU HAVE to do to get mutton at a good price? If you’re a sheepskate you go to a sheep sale. Unless you’re in China where mutton can be rat, mink or fox.
Following closely on the heels of the horses for courses scandal in Europe, where horse meat was found to be the main ingredient in “beef” burgers and other frozen dinners, the Chinese have arrested 900 people for selling fake or tainted meat.
Many experts see the whole thing as a historical progression from the Ming to the Mink Dynasty but point out that those responsible were outfoxed and caught like rats in a trap. Actually, most of the crime in China and other places inhabited by the Chinese is committed by “tongs”, not the implement for picking up things, but gangs. It seems the gang responsible for the rat-meat is associated with the first Chairman of the Communist Party of China and named after him “Mousy Tong”.
In fact, were it not for the change of name of the Chinese capital, all the rats that were up for sale could have been caught by a super rat-catching cat who would closely observe them from a hiding place and then pounce – what one would call a Peking Tom.
An Indian blog called Health And Medicines is high in praise of eating rats: “Rat meat is rich in protein and tastier than chicken.” An Indian official in Bihar state, Vijay Prakash, has said that rat meat is not only a delicacy but a protein-enriched food, widely popular in Thailand and France. He boasted: “Rats have almost no bones and are quite rich in nutrition.”
The Indians are not alone. The queen visited Belize in 1985 and was served a local delicacy, a large fruit-eating rodent known to Belizeans
as the “gibnut”. Seeing that “rodent” and “rat” are synonymous, one of the British tabloids ran the headline Queen Eats Rat. Maybe they should have called it ratatouille. One of my Trini friends said that the practice of rodent repasts goes back to The Bible. “How you think Noah fed all those lions, tigers and other carnivores? That was the reason he was on Mount Ararat.”
I live in Antigua and despite a rapidly increasing rat population there, I am sure we will never get to the stage of eating them, mostly because of our abhorrence of the creatures but also because of their size and ferocity. These are not “mickey-mouse” rats we have here but huge animals that eat barbed wire for breakfast and fight the pit bulls for their food.
Weather
Put it this way: Climate change has caused the weather pattern to change. What little agriculture there was in the country has been further reduced because the weather is now characterized by periods of drought interspersed with short, sharp, heavy showers. The field rats and even the birds have nothing to eat in the fields. The birds come early in the day knocking on our windows begging my wife for food.
She puts out syrup for some, bananas for others and bread for the crows.
On the hot days they use our birdbath. Possibly because of jealousy and maybe the lack of home training, the rats don’t bother to knock. They eat through the wire-mesh screens and head for the kitchen, trying to set up permanent residence behind the fridge or under the stove where it is warm.
Several of them slipped into the engine compartment of my car, possibly trying to hot-wire it and drive off to the pet-food store. Some of the rats are huge because they thrive on dog food. In Antigua an increasing number of people see dogs as the solution to problems of petty larceny and housebreaking. They have huge dogs – Dobermen and Doberwomen, not doberboys or girls.
Rottweilers abound and last, but not leash, pit bulls. These dogs require, if not demand through menacing utterances and threats, manufactured dog food. The household leftovers are not good enough for them and go down the drain.
The rats eat the leftover dog food that is specially formulated for large animals so the protein content is considerable. All this food helps the rats not just to reproduce at an alarming rate.
Under normal circumstances about 95 per cent of rats do not survive because of predators, poison and other measures. However, given that we ourselves are making them fitter and stronger so they can scare the heck out of the cat and fight the dog for food, guess who is winning the rat race?
• Tony Deyal was last seen saying that a female rat goes into heat for about six hours at a stretch and may mate up to 500 times during that period. We would really be in trouble if it is with the same male.
