A bit ruff

Princess Mary's father-in-law Prince Henrik of Denmark is a worry. He's recently confessed to enjoying a spot of dog. I bet I know who'll be hiding the corgis next time he is in the neighbourhood.

The Prince revealed his appetite for Fido to a Danish magazine, saying the meat tasted like rabbit, like dried baby goat. "Or perhaps - I know - like veal, like the veal of a baby suckling calf, only a little bit drier." His favourite recipe is roasted or fried dog cut into thin slices.

The Prince Consort, 72, is French, and was brought up in French colonies in the Far East where dog is often on the menu. But that cuts no ice with incensed animal lovers who have bombarded the royal palace with protest letters.

Prince Henrik (pictured right with a Dachshund) has caused controversy in the past.

Once he said parents should bring up their children like dogs and said his greatest wish was to be reincarnated as a Dachshund in a Danish royal palace. The Prince is honorary president of the Danish Dachshund Club.

Danes are now asking about what happened to a royal Dachshund that vanished in the early 1990s. Sausage dog rolls, maybe?

Dog meat is eaten in some countries. In China, according to Larousse Gastronomique, there is a breed of dog, the Chow, "specially fattened for the table". Crepe de chien, anyone?

But mostly it takes a famine to persuade people to pop domestic animals in the oven. When Paris was under siege in 1870 there were many instances of dog eating recorded. According to Romi in Histoire des festins insolites et de la goinfrerie Victor Hugo writing at the time said, “cat, dog and devil, all things were thrown into bowels like Noah's Ark in our bowels” and the poet Montseret is said to have eaten the meat of a black-furred poodle when he was invited by the play writer, Barriére. It was reported that more than 60,000 dogs and cats  were boiled together and eaten, and all the animals in zoo were devoured. But in those time the animals themselves would have been starving as well.

An1871 Illustration of butcher's shop at Mont Martre in Paris. It was selling cat, rat and dog meat.

In October 2002, Australian government officials in Victoria banned the eating of cats and dogs. The move came after a newspaper sparked public outrage by publishing a story about an Asian man pretending to eat a dog in a shopping centre.

Waitress Rebecca Silva told reporters she took the 10-week-old puppy from the man after he pointed to it and suggestively brought his hand to his mouth several times.

The puppy's owner said she couldn't believe someone was trying to eat her dog. "People in Australia go and get a pie, not a dog," she said. Maybe Princess Mary should get in a supply of pies and teach her father-in-law the Aussie way of doing things.

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