Animal By-products

Dagda Samildanc sends news of the first all-penis restaurant in China, and possibly the world. Every dish at Guolizhuang contains one or more penises from one or more animals (including Canadian seal penis, which costs $517 and has to be ordered in advance.) It’s disturbing to me on many levels, but I guess omnivores have no trouble at all with the concept of a 5 course meal with 6 or seven different penises in it, what with all of the other interesting animal products they consume each day (my all time favourite is still the cod semen in lipstick). The restaurant is a classic example of the pagan sacrifice school of cooking, where the main goal is to enhance virility by eating the sex organs of other creatures (to drive this point home, the hostess has to tell animal sex stories while the patrons eat). This makes perfectly logical sense, in as much as eating any animal makes sense, which, to be clear, it really doesn’t. If limpy diners are really concerned with the connection between diet and sexual prowess, I’d advise them to try out a medically proven, low fat vegan diet – while it might not sound macho, it probably has better odds at a bar than “hey baby, I just ate donkey wang.” Link.

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kunsjoi sends word of an attack with a frozen raccoon. Yup, someone (or someones (or somes one)) threw a frozen raccoon through a family’s living room window. Authorities are treating the case as one of criminal mischief, although the article alludes to thoughts of animal cruelty. While I’m not an expert in American law (as will quickly become apparent), I think the raccoon would have to be alive for cruelty to have occurred – at best, this is desecration of a corpse. Still, the “weapon” part bears further thought – I think the freezer sections of all supermarket butcher departments should be cleared out as a precautionary measure until appropriate policies can be put in place to protect the public. Link.

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canadianSKA sent in another fun topic to pass on to fur-wearers: do you think they know who they’re wearing? While it’s officially banned for import in the USA, dog and cat fur shows up in a number of products. As it can only be detected with DNA testing, and the labels can have a huge amount of “creative leeway,” it’s really anybody’s guess who’s been used in a given garment. I suppose it comes down to a matter of trust with the manufacturer, but how much faith do you want to put in someone whose livelihood comes from anally electrocuting animals, and who then claims to be “against any form of animal cruelty,” as the British Fur Trade said recently? Link.

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Dagda Samildanc sent in a story about a fight at a Florida restaurant. At stake? A steak. Apparently a couple wasn’t satisfied with the quality of a steak they’d ordered, and the argument shifted to a fistfight. It’s easy to spin this by saying “this would never happen with a vegan dish,” but sometimes I almost wish it would, and I don’t mean over the inclusion of animal ingredients – I’m not a huge direct action guy, but for some reason the idea of announcing that a single dish of soggy vegetables doesn’t constitute acceptable vegan options and then starting a brawl is really funny to me, and I’m sure that quote will be taken out of context some day, but hey, think of the shift in media attention and attitudes if there was a vegan fistfighters organization. OK, maybe not. Anyway, the steakers are up for battery charges: Link.

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kunsjoi sent word of a disturbing incident involving a mysterious package that was left at an 18 year old vegan’s door – the box contained an animal head, possibly from a goat or a lamb. Police think it’s “probably a prank,” which is top secret code for “we don’t understand veganism at all.” See, if it was a prank, it would be funny, and then there’d have to be the counter-prank, which would also be kind of funny, because the image of a big box of mutilated tofu amuses me. This is just stupid and disgusting and should be considered a hate crime. Link.

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Nessie sent in a story of a Christmas present gone horribly wrong – the box was for an iPod video, but the contents were, uh, meat. Everyone’s mystified, so here’s a brief explanation: only a certain percentage of an animal’s body can be turned into steaks. Ground meat products can use up a lot of the rest, and luncheon meats and hot dogs can certainly provide a home for some more bits of corpse, but at the end of the day, slaughterhouses are forced to be creative with what they do with the leftover bits of blood, bone, tendon and skin. Some of it gets turned into leather goods and marshmallows, but, well, some of it has to get stuffed into iPod boxes. As factory farming drives margins even smaller, this kind of thing will happen more often. We’re just talking about the animal here – don’t get me started about the byproducts like manure… Link.

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How’s your Dagda Samildanc Day coming along? Are you drunk yet? Perhaps this will help: did you know that in WWII, the US army used more than 6000 bats in experiments? The main project, if you can believe it (and frankly, what’s not to believe), was to use the bats to deliver bombs. I think the idea was that the bats would drop off the bombs and then fly away, but I imagine it didn’t go so well, given the reports of the testing: “…some bats escaped with live incendiaries aboard and set fire to a hangar and a general’s car. Records do not reflect the general’s reaction, but he could not have been pleased.” The project, dubbed Project X-Ray, was later handed off to the navy, and was later abandoned in favour of really big nuclear bombs. Link.

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petesus sent in the biodiesel story of the week, and once again, we see the familiar pattern: all practical applications of biodiesel, and thus the body of all news stories, centre on fuel derived from fry cookers and vegetable crops. Yet for some reason, the lead for each and every story is about a new plant that’s going to convert leftover cow parts into the next superfuel. In this case, it’s a $14 million Canadian facility that’s using animal waste, and I’m guessing that the business plan is reliant on government funding for alternative energy sources. I think that all editors in the world are vegan, and they’re desperately trying to point out the fact that the world’s over-reliance on animals as a food source is creating a huge pile of waste that nobody knows what to do with. The companies involved can spin all they want about how they’re making a bad situation better, but their impact is nothing compared to the adoption of a vegan diet, which eliminates the waste in the first place. Link.

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Between this, the milk thief, and the pizza burglar, it looks like Dagda Samildanc is a shoo-in for VP crime reporter: a robber in Chicago recently held up a bar by threatening the staff with a ham sandwich. No, it wasn’t a vegan establishment, the sandwich (or “breadcicle” as they say in the Windy City) just looked like a gun. The criminal genius was apprehended after he, uh, fell down as he left the bar. So… Does this mean that the USA can never go vegan, because ham is now protected under the Constitution?

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