Party Vibe

Dormice were once eaten in Europe (a practice now highly discouraged outside of Slovenia and potentially illegal in other EU nations). The others would be a lot of effort for comparatively little meat – even cats rarely bother with them nowadays (the one we had at my family house in the 90s/2000s actually delegated the catching of mouse-like rodents to me (after I’d meowed against the tom cat that was bullying him).

This sort of made sense as I had become the alpha male by doing this; but as he would only signal where the nests were – I didn’t realise at first what he was trying to point out and two entire nests of yellow necked mice got away.

I’d already been discussing meowing with cats with some zoology profs at Defra (where I then worked – they thought it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do); when I explained what happened with the mice they thought this was beneficial to the eco system as such mice are rare in England.

Some folk from Africa do eat the somewhat larger Cane Rat. Not the sort of thing I would care to eat myself, but it is presumably tasty enough to go to the effort of not just catching but bringing into England to sell in East London. Alas, this is highly illegal (due to biosecurity and animal welfare laws) so they were discovered by BBC investigative reporters and pulled up by Trading Standards.