This story has it all from culinary, cultural, legal and political angles. Chinese police have arrested a local Communist party official from Guangdong for poisoning the boiled cat stew of a billionaire, Long Liyuan, 49. The accused, Huang Guang, is deputy director of agriculture in Guangdong’s Bajia township and was in a business dispute with Long.
Police say that the death on December 23rd was originally blamed on the restaurant, but the billionaires family pointed out that Huang was in a business dispute over the interest of the men in the cutting down of woodland in the area. That is when they met with a third man for a hot heaping bowl of cat meat. Huang Wen, a friend of Long’s, said he had only eaten a little because it tasted “more bitter” than usual. Police believe Huang used the herb Gelsemium elegans (shown right), a poisonous plant is found in forests in parts of China.
It appears that Huang Wen’s is such a connoisseur of cat stew to know that this one is a bit bitter. What is missing from the coverage is the subject of the meeting. China continues to experience rampant corruption and the destruction of natural areas. Here a Communist official was actively involved in dealmaking over such lands but it does not appear to be as notable as the cat stew. The story was actually reported by a newspaper controlled by the Communist party and may have been an effort to assure increasingly rebellious citizens that officials were not above the law.
What is also interesting is that all three men were reportedly made sick, though Long died of cardiac arrest. If the allegations are true, Huang intentionally poisoned himself to cover his tracks — a dangerous gamble to eat enough to be credible but not enough to be fatal. That is something right out of a Perot mystery . . . or a different taste on the poison scene from Princess Bride with the villian Zizzini:
By the way, the lovers of cat stew are not limited to China. Indeed, Australian officials discouraged eating cat meat but admitted that it is perfectly legal to boil Tinkerbell if you are more interested in a meal than a pet.
Source: Yahoo
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Silly man, the poison was in BOTH goblets!
Our hero had previously built up an immunity to the poison, by slowly building up a tolerance from many previous doses!!!
If you know anything about farm kids you know that there is a chance you are eating some kids pet when you have that beef or chicken or rabbit. “Pet” is subjective not objective. Some dogs are raised specifically for meat and that is no different than cows and pigs.
I ate dog with my Chinese host in Hong Kong years ago. He complained bitterly that the British had outlawed eating dog as immoral the same year they forced the Chinese to permit the opium trade inside China. It was clear to him that Western ‘morality’ placed a higher premium on canines than on people.
It was delicious btw – sort of like pork before we started getting this tasteless pasty other white meat crud.
This is enough to make one a “hare” boil….
i heard he ate a relative of Meow Tse Tung
But I thought cat soup was a vegetable!
The Moar You Know 1, January 4, 2012 at 11:37 am
“I just can’t understand how people can eat pets!”
Some southern Chinese have a saying:
We’ll eat anything with legs except the table,
We’ll eat anything with wings except for an airplane.
They don’t have the luxury of being sentimental about their food.
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I was doing some canoing in the Kluane Game Sanctuary in the Yukon Territory one year.
I asked an old timer “what do you folks eat up here?”, to which he replied, “boy, we eat anything that don’t eat us first.”
“I just can’t understand how people can eat pets!”
Some southern Chinese have a saying:
We’ll eat anything with legs except the table,
We’ll eat anything with wings except for an airplane.
They don’t have the luxury of being sentimental about their food.
raff,
Princess Bride is one of my favorite movies. “Inconceivable !”
It’s all about culture … It took me well over half this article to realize that the stew in question had not been prepared for the cat ..;. 🙄
A pet is another culture’s meal. I’m more put off by the eating of a carnivore although I understand that cougar is rather quite sweet.
I just can’t understand how people can eat pets! Disgusting.
Prof. Turley, I love the clip from Princess Bride. That was one of my kid’s favorite movies!
I recall a law school case out of New Mexico from the 1940s in which a Chinese restaurant was sued for serving dog meat. The principal problem, of course, was that it was being sold as beef. This was apparently not unusual during World War II when beef was rationed.
What this story illustrates is that there is probably not more than one way to skin a cat, but there are many ways to prepare it.
Incredible what people will eat, especially from China.
Such as anything from cat meat to Twinkies which have ingredients from oil fields in China in them.