Bourdain Anthony - Medium Raw

After a surprisingly serviceable meal, I felt pretty good about things. I’d been a nice guy, I thought, had made an effort to be open-minded. The meal hadn’t sucked. We’d even managed to find some common ground.

But then, months later, the poor bastard sent me an e-mail asking (innocently enough) for some statement of support—I think, for the Humane Society. Now, I like the Humane Society for the most part. I may disagree violently with their policy on—and activities on behalf of—anti–foie gras legislation, but I do like cats and dogs. (I’ve adopted one shelter cat after another for much of my life.) I’m supportive of any effort to stop dog-fighting, to spay animals, and to prevent abuse of domestic animals.

I don’t like circuses and, given the chance, would probably vote against the indenturing of elephants and lions and tigers, or any other animals they might want to stand on chairs or train to juggle. I frankly think Siegfried or Roy—whichever one of those guys got mauled by a tiger—got what he deserved. Tigers, to my way of thinking, like to maul people, they’re certainly built for the job, and anything preventing them from doing that on the one hand—while tempting them with a German in a sparkly, cerulean blue suit on the other—is clearly animal cruelty. Somebody who abuses an animal for the sheer joy of it—or solely for purposes of entertainment—should receive, at very least, equal ill treatment.

I’ll go further into PETA territory:

I would have preferred that Steve Irwin, “Crocodile Hunter”—regardless of his saintly conservationist prattle—had ended up as “Crocodile Chow.” That would have been some rough but entirely appropriate justice. In my opinion, the loud, irritating little fuck was in the business of disturbing, poking, tormenting, and generally annoying animals, who would have surely been far happier had they never met him. And if Bindi Irwin lived in my neighborhood, by the way, I would have called Child Protective Services on her parents years ago.

So, contrary to my reputation, I’m like Saint Francis of Fucking Assisi compared to what you might think—a friend to animals large and small, feeder of strays, adopter of runt kittens. A man who, though opposed to vegetarian orthodoxy, is still a reasonable fellow, willing, at least, to listen to the other guy’s point of view.

Until, that is, I got back from Beirut, fresh from a war zone, to find in my inbox an earnest plea for support from my vegan dining companion. The urgency of his tone as he described what was happening to stray cats and dogs somewhere grated on me badly. As I read on, I found myself becoming angrier and angrier—soon becoming furious.

I’d just seen a city not very much unlike Miami bombed back twenty fucking years, I answered in a lather of righteous indignation. From a shameful distance, I’d watched, every day, as neighborhoods filled with people were smashed to rubble. I’d woken up and gone to sleep to the rumble of bombs and rockets rolling through the floor of my otherwise comfortable hotel room. And then seen, up close, the faces of people who’d lost everything—and sometimes everyone —in their lives: the fear and hopelessness and confusion of thousands of people, packed onto landing craft with the few possessions they could carry, off and away to uncertain futures. For nothing. For the “best” intentions, I’m sure—they always are, aren’t they? But, ultimately, for nothing.

I had come straight from that—to this: this message filled with whiny, plaintive outrage on the behalf of the strays of Denver or something like that. There were strays in Beirut, too, I spat out, beginning what I’d intended to be a measured, sympathetic response. Surely, I suggested, where people were being bombed, and whole fucking neighborhoods knocked down to rubble, some doggies got hurt, too? I went on, warming (if not overheating) to my subject, venomously musing that when whole fucking families get crushed in their homes, abandoned pets can become a problem. Having just flown from the tarmac of a floating refugee camp, I now surfed deliriously on a wave of bile. Expanding the scope of my observations to include other places I’d been and other things I’d seen in my travels, I pointed out—any vestige of measured civility gone by now—that it was, perhaps, worth noting as well that anyplace where people were treated like animals—stacked in shantytowns, favelas, communes, and hutments—that animals suffered first and worst. Nobody gives a fuck about cute doggies or cats, much less a fucking dolphin or a white rhino, for that matter, when 90 percent of your diet is fucking bread—when you’re lucky enough to get it—or pounded manioc gruel. Where charred monkey on a stick (in fur) is a life-saving gift for a family, I spewed, all those neatly anthropomorphized animals we so love—like your fucking Yorkie (this was a low blow)—are seen as nothing more than bush meat. Sadistically putting the boot in, I gave examples of places where people are concerned that men in black vans might be coming at night to put hoods over their heads and take them away. Possibly for something they may have casually said, or a neighbor might have thought they casually said—or falsely reported they may have casually said.

I believe I might have mentioned Ceausescu’s Bucharest as an example. Plowing under an entire neighborhood and displacing its residents to build a pharaoh-scale palace, the megalomaniacal dictator had created an instant and frighteningly large population of abandoned dogs. Reproducing at an astounding rate, the desperate animals begat countless roving packs of terrifying and vicious feral dogs, wild, aggressive and hungry predators who knew nothing but the streets. Parts of Bucharest became, particularly at night, a potentially dangerous jungle—with all the dog-on-dog, dog-on-man, and man-on-dog violence imaginable. Embarrassed by this all-too-visible phenomenon, the people’s representatives were urged to deal with the matter. The dogs were eventually hunted down and exterminated in great number. If the death of the “Genius of the Carpathians” and his wife is any example (thoughtfully videotaped and broadcast), one can only imagine how gently the dogs were dispatched.

I believe I ended my bilious and cruel masterwork of an e-mail with the image of the gentle and beloved bovines of India, revered, protected by a population of people who worship them as life-givers, divine. Wandering freely through the streets, always and famously with the right of way, they were free as well, I thought my friend should know, to starve slowly to death, to eat garbage already picked over many times by equally hungry humans, often settling on the discarded plastic bags ubiquitous to impoverished communities where hope is almost gone and municipal garbage removal is a sometimes—if ever—thing. The plastic bags, of course, are indigestible, I explained, gradually becoming twisted and balled up in the cow’s guts and eventually—after what is surely a long period of agonizing discomfort—killing them.

Leaving him with this awful image, I ended in FULL CAPS that given the inconvenient and annoyingly complicated relationship between the conditions in which people live and his adorable animal friends, maybe he should start thinking about people first.

Granted, my reaction was on a par with suddenly taking a baseball bat to the barista who mistakenly used skim instead of soy milk on your latte, but I was really and truly angry. Not at my poor, unsuspecting friend, undeserving of such treatment (from whom I’ve never heard since). He just wanted to save a few animals, after all. It was just his bad luck that he’d asked me for help—and at a very bad time. I was angry at all the shit he made me think about.