Exotic meats of the city by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR Every morning sparrows come hopping through my balcony door and bounce to within inches of my feet in my home office. I’m always amazed at how these delightful crumb-hungry visitors seem entirely oblivious to the notion of how tasty they’d probably be marinated and deep-fried. When one got stuck in my bedroom the other day, I thought this was my chance to finally try one of the exotic meats of the city, but such a little animal would hardly add much to my Hemingway-like aura, so I let him go. This to say that it’s not against the law to catch and kill and eat sparrows or pigeons, or starlings or raccoons or several other urban animals that might look tasty when you’re really hungry. You’re not allowed to feed pigeons in parks, but there’s no rule forbidding you from just sneaking up to one and snapping its neck and bringing it home for your next meal. Pigeons would probably be quite tasty. They sure look like chickens. And they’re the slowest things in the park except for those Tai Chi people (don’t get me started about Tai Chi… a brazen attempt to rehabilitate the art of mime… the most boring activity ever conducted etc.). Once you caught and cleaned your bird, you’ve got free meat for squab pie or pickled pigeon. In the 1800s, New World settlers managed to kill, cook and eat billions of passenger pigeons, which tasted so good somebody ate the very last one in 1900. The chosen hunting technique was to nail a live bird to a perch and sew its eyes shut. This would attract the others into the trap, thus giving us the phrase “stool pigeon.” Some locals still catch and eat pigeons. When the federal Pest Management Regulatory Agency put out a temporary don’t-eat-the-pigeons alert two years ago, they made sure it got out there in Haitian Creole and Italian. Seems some of the tasty birds had gobbled Avirol at the port, which disorients them. Pigeons aren’t considered otherwise risky eats, although crows and blue jays-also legit targets, according to the provincial Fauna and Parks Department (www.fapaq.gouv.qc.ca)-mightn’t be advisable lunch meats considering the West Nile virus. I’m not sure who decides what’s socially acceptable meat these days. It isn’t based entirely on cuteness, as proven by lamb and veal. After the war there was a big push to market horsemeat in this town but it never really caught on. And squirrels remain off limits to urban hunting thanks to the furry-tailed squirrel lobby. But in the islands people rave about a squirrel-like critter called the manicou that tastes quite a bit like chicken and is surefire hit at barbecues. Raccoons look like they carry a lot of meat, plus you get an ultra-cool hat out of the deal. But firearms bring a whole new legal dimension to your hunt and I’m not sure how you’d kill a raccoon without one. I guess you could bang a large object against its head or try to strangle it. I saw a lot of tandoori dog meat while touring Vietnam that didn’t look quite so disgusting after a few weeks. Luckily, times aren’t so hard here that we have to eat our pets, although Fluffy might get worried if we get another referendum. But considering that we kill tens of thousands of unwanted pets a year, it would seem logical to butcher and shrink wrap them after they’re killed and send them off to where they’re considered a delicacy, rather than just letting them go to waste. A grotesquerie perhaps, but a lot of cows, pigs and chickens in the stockyards would applaud the notion. :