He must come from the city!

Lavagirl really took exception to my blog about how to skin a cat, and laid into me, no holds barred, stating amongst other things that:

"Coming from a medical family - my father is a surgeon - I would argue with the extremist view the author purports. Calling dissection "horrific" and "unbelievable" is easy to say from your armchair when you're not faced with some life threatening surgery coming up."

"Has the author ever had surgery? I would rather have a medical student train on a cat so s/he is better prepared to carve up MY body."

"So while the saying may appear "gruesome" to the blogger, I am very surprised he hadn't heard of this practice. He must come from the city!"

So, I am an extremist from the city passing judgments from my comfortable armchair!

Well, what do I say to that? When I was a boy I used to visit my uncle's farm in the country area of New South Wales (yes, I did grow up in the city, Sydney - a beautiful city). My uncle used to call me a city slicker, so I am used to being denigrated as having come from the city, so nothing new there. As for passing unrealistic armchair judgments, well excuse me Lavagirl, I am sorry if it is a surprise to me that they literally skin cats in anatomy training, and yes, I do find it horrific and gruesome.

People like Lavagirl may also take exception to Down to Earth saying that eating cows is unnecessary; we recently received an email suggesting that we should stop talking about not eating turkeys on Thanksgiving; the emailer's argument was that eating turkeys on Thanksgiving is traditional (a bit like the traditional cultural practices of the Faroe Islanders mass slaughtering dolphins that started this whole discussion) and would we mind not pointing out to anyone that we think Thanksgiving can be celebrated very nicely without eating a turkey. How are we supposed to respond to that?

Anyway, I love getting comments, thanks Lavagirl!

Thanks for reading.

Mark Fergusson