Food shortage in Italy and France

[CrONoS]

Hi guy's

I have two questions for you;

- Is there a moment in France history where during a food shortage people from city resolved to eat dogs/cat/rats?
If yes, is there any source where I could verify it.

- And I also wonder if the lack of some kind of birds in Italy were also caused by food shortage? I think read it somewhere...

Thanks,

CrONoS

[Zkribbler]

Here's a paragraph from eHistory re: the Seige of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War.

The first substitute for the regular meat diet was horse. Parisians disdained it, at first, and it took the Horse-Eating Society to inform the public of the advantages to eating horse. When it finally came down to eating them, all breeds were included, from thoroughbred to mules. With time even this type of nourishment became rare, so other meats were introduced into the diet. Dogs, cats, and rats (14) were frequently eaten. The animals of the zoo were added to this diet, including Castor and Pollux, the two elephants that were the pride of Paris. Only the lions, tigers, and monkeys were spared; the big cats for the difficulty of approaching them, the monkeys because of "some vague Darwinian notion that they were the relatives of the people of Paris and eating them would be tantamount to cannibalism." (15)

[Shrapnel12]