Philobiblon

So much around today on how the relationship between humans and animals is horribly awry, a weird mixture of brutality and sentimentality. The Guardian reports on the £2 chicken – cheaper, by weight, than bread, and considerably less healthy – both for the birds, with their terribly short, caged life in an area the size of an A4 sheet, and its consumers, with the huge amount of fat its carcass contains.

Meanwhile in Australia there is what sounds like a hopeless plan to relocate kangaroos overrunning a military base, while not far away farmers, or shooters employed by farmers, will be slaughtering such animals for human and animal food (not necessarily a bad thing – if Australian farmers were to switch to free-range roo husbandry rather than destructive sheep and cattle grazing it would do a great deal to help the much-battered environment).

The money being spent on the military base animals might be spent on a considerably more useful animal welfare cause. Maybe even trying – even if it is probably hopeless – to save the tigers of India.

But Fortnum & Mason is stopping selling foie gras, so that is something, even if not perhaps a something deserving a whole news story of its own.

All of this – of course – in the shadow of another foot and mouth outbreak in England – certain to have originated in imported meat through one route or another.