News arrives that hundreds of cats destined for Vietnamese dinner tables have been rescued, with British animal welfare groups clapping themselves on the back. Let us pause the self-congratulation and examine this through a less sentimental lens. We live in an age where Western sensibilities are projected onto cultures with different historical relationships to food.
The Vietnamese, like many societies, have faced periods of scarcity that forged pragmatic diets. Now, the globalised moral police arrive, tutting and tweeting. But is this really about compassion?
Or is it about imposing our own bourgeois norms on a nation with a different economic reality? The cat, after all, is not sacred in Vietnam as the cow is in India. Our outrage is selective, a luxury of those who have never known hunger.
We declaw the issue, refusing to see the historical cycles: the British once ate horses, the French ate snails, and now we eat factory-farmed misery. Until we confront our own hypocrisies, these rescues are little more than theatre for a decaying empire seeking moral victories abroad.
