Saturday, November 03, 2007

Five portions

This morning V talked me through a heart-rending clip on Guatemalan TV news in which a man from Tabasco saved his parrot from rising flood waters. I'm not sure how ashamed of this I should be, but I usually find footage of stricken animals in these kinds of natural disasters more affecting than the state of the human beings. It still pains me to think of an image of a dog stranded on a roof surrounded by water after Katrina hit Louisiana.

V and I went on to discuss the vegetarian side of our own animals' food preferences. Cherry clearly adores bananas and wolfed down three last night, making plaintive "una mas porfa" noises after the consumption of the first two.

She will eat the meat of the papaya but leave the skin, but that's fine because this is the cats' preferred part of the fruit. Their favourite treat is the stalks of coriander that have previously been floating on the surface of some broth. It's a wonder to watch them delicately pulling this through their tiny mouths. They are also partial to macuy, a local edible weed. Unlike Cherry, they won't give a chunk of banana more than a sniff, but can't get enough of fried plantain.

I suggested to V on our call that an animal she was sure someone referred to as a 'pinche Doberman' was perhaps more likely to be a Doberman Pinscher!

Here in the UK the mother of all stupid studies has attempted to scare us out of eating red meat, apparently a major cause of cancer. Logically then, the Argies, South Africans and those tribes that hunt antelope all the time should be riddled with aggressive tumours, especially as they barbecue most of it. Somehow, I think not.

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