Bad News for the Giraffe

I don't know how this escaped me, but a rabbi named Shlomo Mahfoud (which sounds like a made-up name, in the "Zohan" sense) has declared that giraffe meat is kosher. This must come as a huge relief to the vast Jewish population of the Serengeti. Questions like this one have actually arisen in my life. On a couple of occasions I've been to a restaurant in Nairobi called Carnivore, which serves all sorts of inedible animals, including crocodile, and I've managed to avoid eating some particularly gamy-looking game by pleading Jewishness in the first-degree. Which reminds me: I was once talking to a game scout in Tanzania who had several times eaten elephant trunk. After I got over my initial revulsion, I asked him what it tasted like. "Wildebeest," he said.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2008/06/bad-news-for-the-giraffe/8351/