Danish Journalism Students Procure the Corpse of a Murdered Cat and Then Skin, Cook, and Eat It in Order to Promote Their Careers

The Body of the Dead Tuxedo 

"This is the worst way to draw people's attention to animal welfare. The choice of a cat was an especially bad one, since we get most of our calls about them."

-- Ole Munster of Dyrenes Beskyttelse

Back in June, a group of students at the Danish School of Journalism (Denmarks Journalisthojskole) in Aarhus, Jutland, somehow got hold of a black and white cat that mercilessly had been gunned down by a farmer. They then hired a professional chef who skinned and cooked it. 

Led by twenty-five-year-old Laura Boge Mortensen, editor of the school's magazine Citat, they proceeded to stuff their faces. "Es schmeckt wie Poulet mit Pelz," is how Mortensen later described the dining experience to Zurick's Blick on June 10th. (See "Studentinnen essen Busi.") 

In much the same fashion that teenage hoodlums are not content with merely brutalizing defenseless homeless men but instead videotape the beatings that they administer so as to be able to repeatedly relive their devilry, these students not only published their exploits in Citat but posted thirty photographs as well as a recipe for a dish called "Litter Box" on Facebook. In the uproar that followed the students claim to have received death threats and were given the bum's rush by Facebook.

For her part, Mortensen has given contradictory explanations for her abhorrent behavior. "The idea behind the article was to question why we treat pets and animals raised for food differently," she wrote in a guest column for the Copenhagen Post on June 26th. (See "Is It Okay to Eat Cats and Dogs?") "The press often carries stories about pigs suffering or dying while being transported. At the same time, we spend thousands of kroner each year on our pets, and have few qualms about buying a diamond-studded collar if it will make our pooch look a little cuter."

She also does not see any difference between eating a cat and devouring a pig. "Warum kann man nicht genauso gut eine Katze verzehren wie ein Schwein?" she complained to Blick in the article cited supra. 

Based upon those comments, it would thus appear that she has a grudge against cats and dogs and therefore resents the privileged position that they occupy not only in the hearts and minds of most people but under the law as well. If so, she is certainly not alone.

In fact, that is pretty much the standard fare of birders and wildlife biologists who, whenever they are not taking the law into their own hands, are constantly agitating for the abridgement of all rights currently enjoyed by cats. Although their attacks on canines are far less strident and frequent, they certainly are not in love with them either. (See Cat Defender post of July 19, 2007 entitled "Up to Their Old Tricks, Wildlife Officials Reintroduce Fishers to the Northeast to Prey Upon Cats and to Provide Income for Fur Traffickers.")

In spite of her words and deeds, Mortensen insists that she and her colleagues are not animal rights activists. "It is not up to us to tell people what they can and should do to animals. We just want them to think over what it is they do," she told the Copenhagen Post in the article cited supra.

It Was then Skinned, Cooked, and Eaten

The only logical conclusion to be drawn from the seemingly irreconcilable incongruencies in her declarations is that she is a complete nihilist who supports the consumption of both farm and companion animals. C'est-a-dire, since it is impossible to save every farm animal individuals should not love and respect cats and dogs.

That is really not much different from maintaining that since it is impossible to save every abused and fatherless child that parents should abandon their own children to fend for themselves in the street. Applied on a societal level, adherents of such a philosophy would be in favor of disregarding all concepts of justice and morality and thus allowing evil to triumph unopposed.

Hypocrisy may very well be the "hommage que le vice rend a la vertu," as Francois duc de la Rochefoucauld once argued, but it is still preferable to a world where all considerations of right and wrong have ceased to exist. The goal for both individuals and societies always has been to advance to a higher humanity, not to degenerate into monsters.

The quest therefore is to expand the circle of empathy, not contract it. "Our task must be to free ourselves...by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and beauty," is the way that Albert Einstein once put it.

Since she and her colleagues categorically reject the notion that they are animal rights activists, no matter how warped in their thinking and deeds, Mortensen then falls back upon the claim that they are merely journalists. "We saw ourselves -- and continue to see ourselves -- as journalists who have brought an issue up for discussion," she told the Copenhagen Post.

That argument does not hold water either. By taking possession of an assassinated cat, skinning, cooking, and eating it, Mortensen and her crew ceased to be journalists and became newsmakers themselves.

There also is the disturbing question of how the cat was obtained. For instance, did they put out a contract on its head just so that they could devour it?

This is a matter that should be investigated by both the police and animal rights groups. It thus appears that their inhumane and gruesome conduct was nothing more than a crude publicity stunt designed to further their careers as journalists.

Malheureusement, they probably have succeeded in that regard considering the corruptness and baseness of the capitalist media. "This is the worst way to draw people's attention to animal welfare," Ole Munster of the animal welfare group Dyrenes Beskyttelse of Frederiksberg told the Copenhagen Post on June 11th. (See "Cat-Eating Students Shooed Off Facebook.") "The choice of a cat was an especially bad one, since we get most of our calls about them." 

 

Truer words were never spoken. As Carl Van Vechten wrote in The Tiger in the House, "So the cat through the ages has been more cruelly and persistently mistreated than any other beast." For starters, bird advocates and wildlife biologists are intent upon eradicating them from the face of the earth. Shelters and veterinarians kill tens of millions of them each year and that is only in the Etats-Unis.

Laura Boge Mortensen, on the left, and Another Student Chow Down

  Purveyors of exotic breeds, hybrids, clones, and hypoallergenic cats torture, mutilate and kill countless more in their kennels as do vivisectors in their laboratories. Untold numbers are subjected to random acts of violence every day that include, inter alia, being thrown from speeding automobiles on busy highways, poisoned with antifreeze, shot with rifles, BB guns, and bows and arrows, as well as set on fire and doused with acid. 

Others are preyed upon by dogs, coyotes, fishers, and birds. Millions more are robbed of their claws and ability to reproduce. 

Ailurophobes are attempting to enact draconian laws that will take away their freedom by confining them indoors where they are susceptible to diabetes, hyperthyroidism, and cancer. (See Cat Defender posts of August 22, 2007 and October 19, 2007 entitled, respectively, "Indoor Cats Are Dying from Diabetes, Hyperthyroidism, and Various Toxins in the Home" and "Smokers Are Killing Their Cats, Dogs, Birds, and Infants by Continuing to Light Up in Their Presence.")

Many apartment blocks and assisted-living arrangements will not allow their presence and all feral and stray cats live in mortal danger of the machinations of both private individuals and governmental officials. These abuses have been going on forever and they do not show any sign of abating anytime soon.

As is the case in most of Europe, it is not illegal to shoot feral cats in Denmark. This is bad enough in itself but the petit fait that cat hunters kill innumerable domestic cats by mistake only compounds the atrocities.

Nor is eating feline flesh illegal. The only stipulation that the law makes is that the cat must not have suffered during its execution.

That is more sophistry. If being blindsided by a bullet that blows out its brains and robs it of its all-too-short life is not cruel and inhumane then nothing fits that definition.

The cat's pain may be brief, but it still suffers. More importantly, it suffers the loss of its life and that is what is important.

All of these needless killings and cat-eating publicity stunts could be brought to a swift end if Danish politicians only had the intestinal fortitude to criminalize such conduct and give cats the legal protections that they so desperately need and deserve. By their failure to do so, the Danes are destined to remain outcasts within the civilized world in much the same fashion as the Swiss, Costa Ricans, Australians, and Chinese. (See Cat Defender posts of February 8, 2006 and September 7, 2007 entitled, respectively, "Stray Cats Rounded Up in Shanghai, Butchered, and Sold as Mutton in Restaurants and on the Street" and "Australians Renounce Civilization and Revert to Savages with the Introduction of a Grotesque Plan to Get Rid of Cats by Eating Them.")

Undaunted by either the criticism that she has received or the morally repulsive nature of her actions, Mortensen remains defiant. "Wir stehen einhundert Prozent hinter unserer Aktion," she told Blick.

Her only regret is that Facebook pulled the plug on her gastronomical orgy of bad taste and cruelty toward cats. With her total lack of both decency and shame, she already has all the making of a good journalist and should go far in her chosen field.

With an enrollment of eleven-hundred fulltime students and an operating budget of $16 million, half of which comes from public money, the Danish School of Journalism (DSJ) is the oldest and largest institution of its kind in Denmark. On its website, the school states that its goal is to enhance its position "as the provider of one of the best journalism educations in Europe."

Ole Munster

It goes on to boast that it "has a strong international profile in all of its activities." To that august list can now be added cat-eating.

Universities always have been dens of iniquity where all sorts of disgusting vices and hackneyed opinions have found sanctuary underneath the mantle of scholasticism, but with the reprehensible conduct of these students the DSJ has plummeted to a new nadir. Back in May of 2005, students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa roasted a cat in a microwave oven but even they were not brazen enough to consume its flesh. (See Cat Defender post of September 22, 2005 entitled "College Students in South Africa Cook a Cat to Death in a Microwave Oven.")

Since press reports are silent on the issue, apparently neither administrators nor professors have the bon sens to even disassociate themselves from their students' behavior. Although it is highly unlikely that the students genuinely care about the plight of the trillions of terrestrial animals that are sacrificed each year for human consumption, it is nonetheless a subject that has been ignored for way too long.

Factory farms and slaughterhouses are abominable institutions that should be outlawed. The animals are first of all genetically manipulated which not only endangers their health and well-being but also that of those who consume their flesh, milk, eggs, cheese, and other products.

The conditions under which they are bred and raised are nothing short of heartbreaking. At slaughterhouses, they are cursed, beaten, and dragged down assembly lines where they are often killed without anesthesia.

At Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa, par exemple, a rabbi slits the throats of cows and then a machine turns them upside down and rips out their tracheas. They are then left to thrash about on the floor as they slowly choke to death on their own blood. (See Martha Rosenberg, "Postville, Iowa Needs Four-Hundred Meat Workers -- Start Immediately," in the May 29, 2008 edition of Common Dreams.)

At the Hallmark Meat Packing Company in Chino, California, downer cows are shocked with electricity, waterboarded, and rammed with forklifts in order to force them to their feet so that they can be legally killed. (See Humane Society of the United States, January 30, 2008, "Undercover Investigation Reveals Rampant Animal Cruelty at California Slaughter Plant -- a Major Beef Supplier to America's School Lunch Program.")

Sadly, farm animals are treated as nothing more than inanimate objects. They do not have any rights and their suffering always has fallen upon deaf ears.

The systematic abuse and slaughter of farm animals should be stopped but killing and eating cats contributes absolutely nothing toward the realization of that worthy goal. Tant pis, it only retards the animal rights movement. 

Anyone halfway serious about saving farm animals would begin by becoming a vegetarian, not eating cats. Even those who do not care about animal welfare should be careful about what they are putting in their stomachs.

  Photos: Blick (dead cat and Mortensen) and Dyrenes Beskyttelse (Munster).