Why Did You Eat The Cat?

The Slaying of a Sacred Cow

At certain points in history, certain phrases are uttered that seem to capture the spirit of the age.

They manifest suddenly, with the swiftness of summer lighting, illuminating the epoch and fully encapsulating the zeitgeist— verbal epiphanies, expressing national sentiments still in gestation. These declarations become immortalized in our collective memory, functioning as cairns and touchpoints for our descendants. These off-hand remarks spontaneously unveil the psychology of a particular milieu, as if the utterance emerged straight from the nation’s soul.

“Give me liberty, or give me death!”

Iconically American. A rallying cry that preserved the nation through her birth pangs, and even expedited the labor. When Patrick Henry spoke those words, it was as if America herself whispered them from the womb.

Normally, these iconic utterances emerge from the lips of great statesmen and artists, figures at the forefront of history. Other times, they come from the faceless masses.

I believe such a statement was recently delivered. Not from the lips of a president or prime minister, but from an American police officer in Ohio.

“Why did you eat the cat?”

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The question was recorded from a body camera. (Ironic, as in many cases the implementation of such body cameras was a direct result of the Black Lives Matter movement). From the footage, we see the officer addressing a Haitian woman leering over a dead cat. The officer is stupefied. His tone wavers in disbelief. “What did you do?” “Why did you kill the cat?” “Did you eat this cat?” The woman’s expression was blank. There is no shame in her gaze, nor fear, only a deer in the headlights daze, and a slight annoyance in having had her meal interrupted.

The officer turns to address the equally bewildered black American family whose yard was hosting the impromptu Haitian picnic. The officer asked if they saw what happened. They explained that they had just pulled up to the driveway when they witnessed the intruder’s exotic snack. They confirm to the police officer that she was indeed “eatin’ it.”

This is certainly not a joke, and I am not even sure if it’s funny. How could it be? But I am sure of one thing: these words express a surge of repressed sentiments that have been simmering in the American psyche.

The woman in question is not a deranged crackhead. Nor was this an isolated incident.

Springfield is a working-class town in Rustbelt Ohio. In 2020, its population sat at just under 60,000 people, with 98% US citizens.

Over the last 4 years, 20,000 Haitian migrants were moved into the town.

Imagine it. Imagine your city or town today. Imagine if over four years, one-third of the population became foreigners. Foreigners with different customs, different moral compasses, different appetites.

There is much that could be discussed regarding the Springfield case. We could examine how the influx of foreigners has incapacitated the town’s public services, with local clinic times tripling, schools overwhelmed with new students who don’t speak English, and a housing crisis. We could also look at the fact that according to the FBI’s data explorer, violent crime increased 242% between 2019 and 2022.

Or even better, the driving issue. Apparently, the new arrivals can’t drive, and have a penchant for crashing cars. Tragically, one such Haitian, driving illegally, took the life of a boy last year when he hit a school bus head-on:

Social media posts from Springfield are full of such anecdotes. And up until recently, these stories have managed to remain hidden from the public eye. Thankfully, a friend of mine on twitter, Martin (captivedreamer7), along with a few others has singlehandedly managed to insert these stories into the national spotlight. An impossible feat but three years ago. For all of Elon Musk’s faults, his acquisition of Twitter has made discussions of such uncomfortable topics possible.

But my focus today will not be on overall crime or public system failures. This occurs whenever large immigrant populations are inserted into a community. Our focus today is on national psychology. On a looming current that shall soon bubble over.

Liberals have no problem closing their eyes and explaining away most of the toxic effects of mass migration. “These are good people looking for better lives.” Appeals are made to universal empathy and our mission to the huddled masses. “So what if we have to put up with some minor inconveniences?” There are only a few sacred cows left for the liberal. And yet, two months before the election, a group of immigrants has been revealed to be slaughtering (and even consuming) one of the last of such cows. The double irony is that a popular argument in defense of immigration relates to the culinary enrichment such groups bring.

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Dietary taboos are one of the oldest frameworks for ethnic and religious distinction. The intimacy of a meal and its primacy in the human experience has led to every culture in history developing intricate customs around the breaking of bread. From the ritual of the meal itself to conceptions of humane slaughter, it is no wonder that the act of eating ends up so intertwined with religion and identity. Buddhists are vegetarian, as they judge all consumption of meat to be immoral. Most Hindus follow suit, but save their strictest condemnations for the eating of beef, due to their reverence for the cow. Well, Muslims are just fine eating cow! As long as the meat is Halal, meaning the slaughter was carried out with the necessary prayers and execution technique. If not, the meat is haram. Jews have a similar concept, Kosher, and while Muslims can eat shellfish, Jews are not so lucky. Christians can eat anything! They go so far as to eat their own God! But wait, the Council of Jerusalem asserted that Christians cannot consume blood, so how does that explain the Brit’s affinity for Black Pudding?

Did the religious restrictions arise from something as banal as ancient tribal hygiene, only to be progressively mythologized into divine mandate? Or is there an allegorical component? Regardless of the origin of these restrictions, they were certainly not arbitrary, and in certain ethnic groups, they predate the religious pretext.

A formative moment for me occurred during my time living in East Africa. I was there for several months, and it was there that I finally developed an understanding of difference. The most immediate and fascinating differences I observed were tribal differences. Radical differences in psychology, morality, and worldview, between groups of people who all lived within the same corner of the world. A particularly glaring tribal distinction was the customs around food consumption. What could be eaten, and how to humanely it.

Early on in my stay in Tanzania, I was huddled around a group of Maasai who were slaughtering a goat. I was the one who paid for the goat and incited the affair so that I could play amateur anthropologist while filling my hungry stomach. The Maasai custom for killing a goat involves holding the creature down and suffocating it with the knee until the soon-to-be meal is knocked unconscious. Immediately after it passes out, they turn it over and stab it in the heart. The Maasai explained that this was the humane thing to do, by knocking the animal unconscious it can then be dispatched painlessly with a knife to the heart.

An odd thing occurred during this process. I remember turning and seeing two of my Kenyan guides visibly disgusted. One of them even turned away and left until the animal was dead. Afterwards, I asked them about their reaction. They explained that in the tribe they come from, they slaughter a goat by slitting its throat. The Maasai way of doing things was abhorrent in their mind, all those moments of struggle as you attempt to choke the poor thing unconscious— totally barbaric! Of course, when I asked the Maasai about this alternative means of execution, they covered their faces in horror. To let a creature bleed out! What cruelty! And even worse, than you waste all of its delicious blood!

I remember reflecting on this strange and radical difference in feelings towards ethics and suffering. What could have led to two radically different conceptions of cruelty and mercy? Regardless of the origin, these dietary differences were real, and rooted deeply in their respective tribal psychologies.

Another more striking example was the difference between the Maasai and the Hadza Bushmen. The Maasai are semi-nomadic pastoralists, while the Hadza live an existence as hunter-gatherers in the wilderness. The Maasai have a strikingly noble perspective towards nature and morality. They only consume the meat and milk of their livestock, which consists mainly of cows and goats. But they refuse to eat any bushmeat or wildlife, for they are not under the Maasai’s licit domain. And they refuse to even harm animals other than their own cattle. I was once scolded by a Maasai for almost killing a bee and witnessed a look of pure disgust when I flicked a potentially deadly spider outside of my tent. A look that said, “What kind of monster are you?”

And so due to this, the Maasai perceive the Hadza bushmen as utterly inferior beings driven by a sinister and incomprehensible moral code. Why? Because the bushmen hunter-gatherers subsist off of game meat from the bush. What monsters! How could one eat those poor creatures of nature? How could anyone stoop so low?

What can we make of this? That morality develops both after and as a justification for a groups lifestyle? Or possibly the reverse? Again, the origin does not matter. What does matter is how thoroughly rooted dietary restrictions can be in our ethnic/cultural identity, and how such taboos can arise directly out of our moral foundation. Dietary restrictions are not arbitrary. They are fundamentally bound to the depths of our being. And that is not a bad thing.

Americans for the most part have been fortunate to live in a country where its citizens share mutually tolerable dietary practices. But I think everything we have discussed so far partly explains why there was an early internet culture war over veganism. Alien dietary modes presume alien ethical outlooks, and nobody wants an alien in their midst, even if they will not flat out say it.

But Americans recently came face to face with foreign culinary proclivities when a virus that ravaged world economies was reported to have emerged from a Wuhan wet market. “What is a wet market?” Many naive souls inevitably wondered. I can only imagine the shock and disgust that was choked back and kept in check by liberal composure at discovering what a Chinese wet market really was. All manner of wildlife sold for consumption in open-air facilities. Bats, snakes, dogs.

Dogs! Mans best friend! The perception of the Chinese as dog eaters is contextualized by Americans as a pernicious racial slur, a byproduct of the dark ages of the early 20th century, a black mark on the American soul. The problem is that the stereotype is true. I learned this fact early, when a relative of mine who grew up in a foreign service household explained to me that while living in a certain east Asian country as a child, she had a dog named Soy Sauce. Unfortunately, there was a problem in this country involving individuals stealing dogs to sell them for the meat. Lo and behold, one-day Soy Sauce goes missing, and poor Soy Sauce was most likely served over a large portion of his savory namesake. How’s that for nominative determinism?

Hearing this as a child made a strong impression. I did not necessarily hold it against the Chinese for eating man’s best friend, as long as they didn’t try that over here. I also remember my elementary school teachers horror when I shared this story in class, I was oblivious to the racial implications of the story at the time, but that did not save me from a long and stern talking too. “Its true!” I insisted. How could the truth get me in trouble?

And so the whispers of Chinese eating dogs have always lingered in the shadows of the American subconscious, so they were inevitably prepared to face such a fact when it presented itself. And Americans could take a deep breath, and repeat a line about cultural differences, before moving on with their day. Furthermore, the horrors of canine consumption always lurked in the distance, no Chinese were eating dogs in American streets. The American never truly had to confront this difference.

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Cats seem to sit at the top of the American hierarchy of animals. This is not something unique to the USA. The Egyptians considered them gods, and to murder a cat was a death sentence. Islamic culture reveres cats, and they are the superior house pet in a religion that scorns dogs. There is no reason too dislike them. Noble, adorable, and most importantly— useful creatures— the cat takes care of man’s domestic pests and asks for nothing in return. And the cat’s famous habit of dispatching a near-universal symbol of evil, snakes, has elevated the creature into an archetypal symbol of good in mythologies the world over.

In American popular culture cats are the subject of a minor cult. Memes, videos, you name it, cats are at the center of a kind of popular civic devotion. To harm a cat is unthinkable in the mind of an American. Killing a cat is like killing a child.

So imagine the shock experienced by a provincial rust belt town, at having a foreign population imported over four years that has no qualms about eating cats. Not privately either, but publically, in the street. In front of children.

When the news hit the internet this week, many came to the Haitian’s defense to claim this was all one big racist lie. Capturing and killing ducks in the public park? Well Americans go duck hunting too! They really are not so different from us, even if the way they go about things is a bit foreign. But cats? This must be a lie, Haitians don’t eat cats!

Well, they do. And more than a minute of research will reveal this to you. Americans for the first time are truly face to face with the Other, and the Other is sitting in their back yard. It is one thing to go meet the other while traveling such a meeting is usually mutually beneficial. It is another thing to have the Other imported to your towns in mass. And Americans will soon develop a robust understanding of human differences. This understanding will not come about comfortably and it will not be mutually beneficial.

Man is divided by irreconcilable differences. But this is not a bad thing. Difference does not need to be destroyed, as it is our differences that define our identity and give man his dignity. Difference just needs space to breathe. A lot of space.

The leftist is threatened by the existence of difference, as it threatens their entire worldview. In their mind difference is something to be overcome through direct contact. But this does not eliminate difference, it only breeds violence.

The average American should not have to come face to face with radical difference, just as the average Maasai should not be forced to live side by side with the Hadza Bushmen. The natural boundaries between them preserve their respective dignity and ways of life. If all the tribes of East Africa were forced into the same neighborhoods and confined there, the countries would implode.

The phrase that defined the birth of America: “Give me liberty, or give me death.” An assertive proclamation, a confident declaration of the nation’s future and self-destiny.

The phrase that I believe will come to define the America of the moment: “Why did you eat the cat?” A flabbergasted and anxious inquiry. A meek question directed towards an invasion of the other.

But there is still time. We are at a historical crossroads, a possibly apocalyptic juncture. The invasion of the Other in Ohio was directly facilitated by the Biden regime and an infernal matrix of “charity” organizations, many of which are Catholic. Whatever problems you have with Donald Trump, know this: the choice on the ballot this November is between Liberty and the Cat-Eaters.

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I will leave you with this: When I was leaving Tanzania, I asked one of the Kenyan guides if he was returning to his country now that his job was over. He looked at me very nonchalantly and said, “No, I will wait here a couple more weeks. It’s election season in Kenya, and I want to wait until it’s over.”

I was perplexed. I naively asked him why he did not want to go home and participate in the election, to vote, to fulfill his civic duty. I will never forget his response.

He explained that in Kenya the democracy was not as “developed” as it was in Tanzania. In Kenya, voting is done purely on tribal and ethnic lines. Due to this, every election season brings with it brutal political violence. It is a normal occurrence for gunmen to enter busses, ask everyone for their ID card, and those from rival tribes would all be shot on the spot.

It was at that moment that I had my own epiphany. Maybe, just maybe, certain differences are irreconcilable. And as I sat on that airplane, flying back to my own country, I wondered if such a thing could ever happen here.

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