While Flightglobal’s Hyperbola blog previously referenced the science fiction movie Soylent Green (1973) as a warning as to how far the current European horsemeat scandal may go – as Charlton Heston’s character exclaimed about mankind’s futuristic food stuff: “Soylent Green is People!” – it seems it might have been prophetic. As reported by the BBC documentary Horsemeat Banquet, recent DNA tests carried out on dishes from curry houses and take away restaurants have found a lamb curry to have no lamb in it. Nor, for that matter, did it have chicken, beef, horse or goat. Instead.the meat used was described as being an “unspecified meat” which had the UK press speculating that it could be dog or cat or perhaps an even more terrifying alternative.
Still, on the cat front, there could be good news for those owners not wanting “Tiddles” (or whatever their moggy is called) to land up in a vindaloo. Inventor and cat lover Dave Evans has devised a small GPS satellite location tracker device to fit on a cat’s collar allowing an cat owner to download their pet’s movements onto a map of the local area. He reportedly originally invented the device to find out why his cat Yollo was gettting fat, suspecting that others were feeding him extra dinners. While the “CatNav” device, which is now being marketed under the name G-Paws, does not yet transmit a live location, it will at least allow their owners to make sure that they pet’s daily travels do not take them too close to the local Indian food take away. Of course, it really will be a sickener if a G-Paws CatNav device is ever found in an Indian curry.
Unfortunately, it can also be a matter of time before over-anxious parents put the devices on their children and Orwellian-surveillance-loving governments put them on their citizens. But if it keeps us proles from becoming dinner for others, perhaps we might yet become in favour of wearing them.
