The goat couldn’t have been more than a few months old. Still milk-fed with the most beautiful light pink flesh and the tiniest testicles - butchers always prefer male animals, leaving the females to produce milk and/or reproduce. Some will also say that the meat of female animals is smelly but I detect misogyny in this attitude! Anyhow, I photographed my baby goat from all angles, marvelling in my post at its beautiful flesh and minute attributes before enthusing about the tenderness of the cooked flesh. I didn’t think twice about the consequences of describing our enthusiasm at eating such a small animal. After all, people have been eating beasts (young and old) for millennia.
For a long time, I only had positive comments on the post, from people who, like me, enjoyed eating milk-fed animals and wanted to know more about the length of time I cooked the baby goat, how long I marinated it, and so on.
Then out of the blue, months after the initial post, I started receiving virulent emails and comments that accused me of being a ‘baby killer‘. Now it is true that in an effort to be lyrical in a funny, even if slightly gruesome way, I compared the tender flesh of the baby goat to that of a plump pink baby and I may have gone overboard about how tiny its testicles were but it was all done in good humour and certainly without any intention of stirring up controversy. It would all have passed without a stir if it weren’t for some animal activist who must have landed on my blog because of a link to one of my posts and who then decided to trawl through until he/she unfortunately fell on the story of my baby goat dinner.
I had never received a message so nasty and for a week or two, it was relentless. First from one person, then from either his/her friends or emails by the same person but from different addresses. And he/she was not satisfied with attacking me but also went after those who had left comments on my blog. All in all, a very unpleasant experience which I would have referred to the police if I had lived in the US. They seem to take such things much more seriously there.
The irony of it was that I was not trying to spark controversy by telling the story of how I secured my baby goat, prepared it then served it to my friends. It’s true that my metaphors were a little close to the bone and could have been slightly unsettling to those with a squeamish nature - or those without much sense of humour - but still, my intention was to be amusing and informative and certainly not controversial. I didn’t, and still don’t see any problem with eating baby animals. Spaniards are crazy about piglets and Filipinos love balut (duck foetuses that are boiled while still in the shell, then slurped down in one go). A great delicacy that is totally normal for Filipinos would probably also be highly controversial for some, like those activists I had the misfortune to encounter. If they were so incensed by my decision to eat a baby goat, I can only imagine what kind of hate mail I’ll receive when I eventually post about my balut tasting!
