But it went rather further than that. The point of Hill's blog was to surface the ethical issue of whether the expense of hundreds or thousands of pounds on medical care for a domestic pet, when there were so many people in the world in dire circumstances who could benefit from such an amount of money. Was one's responsibility to the slave animals one took in, or to other members of one's own species?
All of which, in some convoluted way, reminded the Cow of the remark during the angry beef dinner about "not eating anything with a face". At what point did one draw the boundaries between those species, or life forms, one considered friend, and those one considere food?
Cabbage, after all, had a head, if not a face, as did lettuce. Potatoes had eyes. Carrots reportedly emitted the electronic equivalent of a high-pitched scream when pulled out of the ground, and potplants in the kitchen had been known to "faint" when an egg - and last informed, chickens were still regarded as a separate species to asparagus ferns - was cracked into a pan nearby.
And yet, while people disagreed about quite where in the biological hierarchy to draw the boundary, there was almost universal agreement that eating one's own species was taboo. If one was human, that is. Resident in a society that subscribed, broadly, to values considered "civilised" by North Americans and Europeans. And not named Arwin Meiwes.
Which is presumably why the German state felt a need to retry him. Having consumed the entire attention capacity during the trial, the fascination with the breaking of this taboo would not let the public rest. They wanted a rerun. And having worn out the heads on their VCRs playing and rewinding the recordings, and stretched the videotapes, they needed a real life action replay. It's so much more comfortable, after all, to project evil onto someone else - whether they're eating human steak with pepper sauce, or considering having inconvenient pets put down.
Carnivorous Cow shook her head, slowly, and muttered to Gramsci, "People are funny!"