The Maltese national dish is supposed to be rabbit, even though few people cook it at home and eat it only on a night out with friends at some crummy bar. I’ve always wondered about that. Why do you have to go and sit in some shoddy and uncivil place full of shouting, ugly people wearing dreadful outfits so as to eat a messy plateful of bad rabbit and then feel obliged to call it fun?

Both the rabbit and the surroundings are invariably horrid. Maybe cooking rabbit at home, where it is bound to be better (and the atmosphere more congenial) is just not done, because rabbit is not something you cook yourself. It’s something you eat while slumming it in some awful large room full of ghastly furniture and even ghastlier people, with a television blaring on the wall and absolutely no aesthetic or culinary relief. Eating rabbit with friends even has a special name, which it wouldn’t do if it were as ordinary as eating hamburgers, which are the real national food.

These are bunny rabbits we’re talking about – you know, Peter Rabbit and Watership Down and Mr Floppyears, but still we eat them because that’s what we’ve always done and we never stop to think that they are just as much pets as kittens are. For years I couldn’t eat rabbit because I kept them as pets as a child and saw them as the stars of a hundred children’s stories. When I was served rabbit once as a guest, aged about 20, I tried to eat it and almost passed out. It was my food taboo (one of them). Though I’m no longer bothered and will eat rabbit happily now as long as it’s not in some awful bar, cooked by some off-duty quarry labourer, the memory of how ill I felt when I tried to eat it back then gives me some glimmer of understanding of why there’s all this fuss about cats being taken off the street, possibly for food.

So yes, I can understand why people react with disgust at the thought that somebody’s been picking up stray cats and cooking them. Eating cats is a sort of a food taboo to us, even though we happily eat rabbits and do so with pride. I say ‘sort of’ because nobody seems to have thought twice about eating cats and dogs in the worst of World War II. There were no strays back then – they ended up in the cooking pot, along with the occasional rat. When families no longer had food for their dogs in the siege of Malta in the 1940s, they sold the dogs themselves as food.

But while I can understand the disgust felt by those who express it all over the Internet, it’s a little more difficult to see how they make the mental leap from feeling disgusted to deciding that because they are disgusted at the thought of eating cats, then eating cats must perforce be illegal. Eating cats is not against the law – nor, for that matter, is picking up and taking, for whatever reason including food, stray or feral cats. By definition, those belong to nobody and are there for the taking. Theft is only theft when there is ownership. Feral cats have no owners, and they are not a public good.

Newspapers and television have here a good, attention-grabbing story, which makes a change from the antics and pronouncements of our more irritating politicians. Apart from that, there is no law-breaking or public interest angle unless the cats are being sold under false pretences as other meat. If you wish to sell cat meat as cat meat, and think that people will buy it, there is nothing to stop you as long as you have the required licences and hygiene certificates that all meat-sellers and food-animal breeders are obliged to obtain. But if you are not selling it, you need nobody’s permission to eat a cat.

There is so much confusion about animal cruelty laws. The law does not lay down that you are allowed to eat certain kinds of animals but not others. It does not give you permission to eat pigs, cows, chickens and bunnies but not cats and dogs, with a big question mark over whether you’re allowed to buy your pet shop’s entire stock of guinea pigs and stew them to try out that interesting Peruvian recipe (they’re the national food there). The law merely lays down that you are not permitted to treat animals with cruelty, and that there are penalties if you are caught doing so. Eating something that is dead already is not classed as cruelty (obviously, as corpses are not sentient), nor is killing animals (because we would have a very hard time if that were the case) as long as they are killed with the minimum of cruelty and pain.

There was a big fuss in the news yesterday because some Chinese chap was reported to the police by a pet shop owner from whom he bought large quantities of cat food. Nice going – you give a shop a lot of business and he reports you because of the ongoing ‘who’s kidnapping strays’ hysteria, ghax dawk ic-Cinizi jieklu kollox. The police should have been a bit more responsible when issuing their call for people to report any suspicious movements involving stray cats. They should have told us exactly which laws could possibly be broken here. If they do catch somebody picking up strays and eating them, under which law are they going to prosecute?

I can see the constitutional writs flying already: prosecuted for eating a cat but not prosecuted for eating a rabbit. Quite frankly, if people want to eat cats, let them. This is supposed to be a liberal society, judging by the number of politicians claiming to represent many thousands of new Maltese liberals. For decades I had big issues about eating bunnies and lambs but never campaigned to stop others eating them, and now I eat them myself. If I recoil at the idea of eating cat, and I do, it is because of a general revulsion for all but the most normal cuts of meat from normal food animals. It has absolutely nothing to do with sentiment or a propensity to anthropomorphise Felix, Tom and Orlando the Marmalade Cat. And in certain cultures, eating cats is normal – and in others, eating rabbits is not.