No animals were harmed in the making of this post. (Well, one, but I didn't do it.)

It’s a well-established fact that Ruddy Ruddy is an Ontario Chicken Lover. But poultry is paltry. A letter from Superior Farms, a California-based purveyor of USDA choice premium lamb, serves notice that nothing tastes finer or more succulent than a cuddly animal — preferably a mammal — cut down in the prime of youth.

It’s true. Lamb not only sounds better than mutton; it is better. Veal tastes better than beef. Suckling pig tastes better than pork. Fawn meat probably tastes better than venison (it’s my firm belief that the hunter who shot Bambi’s mother was aiming at the wrong deer). Eggs don’t taste better than chicken, however. Why? In a word, cruelty.

Before an egg hatches, it cannot know the pain, fear, and confusion of having its brief life extinguished so that a higher life form can feast on its tender young flesh. And it is precisely these emotions that make slaughtering young animals so worthwhile. Science tells us that the pain, fear, and confusion hormones released from the brain are, in fact, pure concentrated deliciousness; a single drop of these chemicals placed on your tongue would induce instantaneous orgasm. As the animal is slaughtered, these hormones spread throughout its body and infuse the meat with taste. The smarter the animal, the bigger the brain, and the greater the degree of deliciousness. And because a young animal’s body is so much smaller than an adult’s, while its head is proportionately larger, its meat is infused with proportionately more of these hormones. This is what makes them so much tastier. When Morrissey sang, “meat is murder,” he was absolutely right. But he forgot to add that murder is delicious!

(This doesn’t mean that killing unborn animals is pointless, however. Eggs, while kind of boring to eat, are a great source of protein. And I heard a great anecdote once where a bunch of Hollywood stars were trying to impress each other with their footwear, and Peter Lawford — drunk as a lord, as usual — trumped the guy with baby calfskin boots by heavily plopping his shoes on the table and slurring, “Unborn fetal porpoise.” This is why the Rat Pack were so cool.)

Superior Farms don’t mess around when it comes to showing their contempt for the sanctity of life when deliciousness is at stake; the envelope they sent Ruddy Ruddy arrived with a big insect corpse crushed onto it. “Here,” they seem to be saying. “This is how much we love killing things!” And I’m convinced.

What’s inside? Well, just some recipes for lamb, actually, as you’d expect. Except, they’ve thrown in one recipe for veal parmigiana as well. It turns out they do a little of that on the side. It’s like they don’t care what kind of meat they’re selling, as long as it’s young and dead. You want kitten? See these guys. Puppy? They’ll make it happen. A baby monkey? You might be able to work something out. I love this company.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that Superior Farms isn’t actually pure evil. And there’s also always the possibility that I’m only writing this to horrify PETA, who also recently sent Ruddy Ruddy a questionnaire just like the one they sent last May.

Only this time, instead of trying to bribe Ruddy Ruddy into responding with two shiny pennies, they’ve upped their offer to a shiny nickel, which brings Ruddy Ruddy’s lifetime cash earnings to a cool seven cents. And what’s even better is that after another six months with no response from Ruddy Ruddy, PETA are bound to come back holding out a dime, begging him once again to take their survey. I can smell their desperation. And it smells delicious as a barbecued baby elephant.