Give her the holly

“Maybe yous should give her the holly and eat her.”

This was the armchair wisdom from a friend last week when I informed him that one of the hens at home isn’t laying anymore.

In actual fact, the hen in question – Shakira – is still laying, although the eggs are without shells and as such, recovery of these membrane-covered mini-meals is almost impossible.

“Seriously,” the friend continued. “A man like you should have no bother doing the deed and then the plucking.”

A man like me? A man who is complicit in acquiring then rearing and caring for a brood of chooks only to stick one of them in the pot as soon as they stop contributing to household supplies.

Admittedly, I had also been complicit in small scale butchery and plucking in days gone by.

“This is different,” I told my friend. “Shakira is more a pet than an egg producer. I’d be excommunicated from the clan if I landed into the house with a plucked hen and it still warm.”

“They’d get over it. No eggs means you’re feeding her for nothing. Times are tough. There’s no room for freeloaders these days.”

“If that was the rationale we all live our lives by, I’d have skinned Waffle for the pot long ago.”

However, I couldn’t argue part of my friend’s point. Times are indeed tough and feeding a non-producing hen isn’t entirely ideal. But then my point also stands whereby she’s more a pet than an item of poultry livestock.

But my friend was on a roll…

“If times get any tougher I’ll give you a hand with Waffle. Waffle lasagne?”

“Wise up.”

Not that I am, dear reader, for one moment advocating the consumption of pets but I am also acutely aware that eating dog meat is not strictly taboo in many other countries.

Did you know, for example, that the Swiss are not averse to eating dogs at Christmas? Alas, it is true.

To a limited extend, dog meat is still being consumed in Korea, China, Indonesia, Nigeria and Vietnam.

Savages! You might cry. Alas, it is also true that eating dog meat is not even illegal in this country. Perhaps because, as a nation of dog lovers, there is scant legislation requirements for a people who consider dog meat as morally corrupt.

Not to be deterred of course, my so-called friend decided to run with his previous Waffle lasagne comment and for the rest of the weekend, sent regular messages of Waffle-inspired dishes. Needless-to-say, I didn’t reply to any of his half-baked concoctions like Waffle roulade with blackcurrant jus or Waffle fricassee with okra or Waffle, bacon and eggs. He was obviously getting a kick of things though, because the messages didn’t stop.

For the most part, as I say, I ignored these half-baked attempts at humour (he was thinking that he was winding me up, God love him), but there was one message which veered away from the norm and it was this one that at least which had me wide-eyed in amazement.

To put this into context, the message was a copy and paste job from somewhere, an excerpt from ‘The South Pole’ by famed Arctic adventurer, Roald Amundsen.

In the off chance you are unaware, Norwegian explorer, Amundsen and his party of adventurers had famously planned on consuming their sled dogs during an expedition to the South Pole in 1911. The thinking was that such meals would allow the company to carry less food, thus lightening the load. Notwithstanding the morality of what he was doing, his tack succeeded, seeing as how he won the race to the pole.

The message from my friend was this paragraph from ‘The South Pole.’

Amundsen wrote, “There is the obvious advantage that dog can be fed on dog. One can reduce one’s pack little by little, slaughtering the feebler ones and feeding the chosen with them. In this way they get fresh meat. Our dogs lived on dog’s flesh… the whole way, and this enabled them to do splendid work. And if we ourselves wanted a piece of fresh meat we could cut off a delicate little fillet; it tasted to us as good as the best beef. The dogs do not object at all; as long as they get their share they do not mind what part of their comrade’s carcass it comes from. All that was left after one of these canine meals was the teeth of the victim – and if it had been a really hard day, these also disappeared.”

At the time of writing, both Shakira and Waffle are living still. And long may that continue. I don’t reckon there are any trips to either Switzerland or Antarctica on my agenda.

Also, what are the Swiss thinking about?