By Maurice the Goat

I’m sitting here with my third beer of the morning, reading about lemurs getting eaten in Madagascar, and I’m thinking Christ, we can’t even leave the cute ones alone. These bug-eyed little bastards have been swinging through trees like they own the place—which they do or did—until some asshole with a few extra dollars decided primate tastes better than chicken.

It’s always the same story. Somebody gets a little money in their pocket and suddenly they’re eating something that should be left alone, like those rich pricks I used to work for at the post office, guys who’d spend a week’s wages on wine just to prove they weren’t like me. The scientists—poor suckers—spent four years counting corpses: 10,000 lemurs carved up and sold in 17 cities. That’s 2,500 per year, about seven per day. Seven lemurs a day dying so some middle-class nobody can tell his friends at dinner how “pure” and “clean” his meat is.

Pure, my ass. There’s nothing pure about eating the last of anything. I’ve eaten plenty of things I shouldn’t have: gas station hot dogs at 3 AM, the dreams of women who loved me, years off my life with cheap whiskey. But at least I never pretended it was making me a better man.

These Madagascar hotshots—making maybe two grand a year, which is rich there, apparently—they’re chomping on brown lemurs and ruffed lemurs, paying triple what beef costs because extinction tastes expensive. The government banned lemur hunting sixty years ago, which is like me swearing off drinking every Monday morning: good intention, lousy follow-through.

The researchers found that more than half of these dining room philosophers know damn well there’ll be fewer lemurs next year, but they keep eating them anyway. Because knowing something’s wrong and giving a shit about it are two different animals entirely. One bureaucrat promised to “investigate,” which in government speak means we’ll think about maybe considering doing something after lunch, next decade, if we remember.

Meanwhile lemurs keep disappearing like good women, like decent jobs, like the kind of hope that doesn’t leave you face-down in your own vomit. The conservation people are screaming about going after the consumers, and they’re right. You don’t stop a whorehouse by arresting the girls.

But here’s the thing: as long as humans exist, something beautiful will be dying in someone else’s mouth while the rest of us sit around reading about it, finishing our beer, and pretending we’re different. The lemurs had those big dark eyes, the kind that look right through you like they know something we forgot how to remember. Now they’re just meat, served with rice and a side of human stupidity.