]]]]]]]]]]]]      SAUSAGE ISN'T THE CAT'S MEOW    [[[[[[[[[[[[[[
                       By Mark Porubcansky           (1/29/1989)
                      --------------------
                      The Associated Press
    (From the New York Daily News, 27 January 1989, p. 12:1)

             [Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]

   MOSCOW -- A newspaper sued  by furious meatpackers for writing
that not  even cats  will eat their  sausage said  it assembled a
jury of unbiased cats and only one would eat it.
   ``Twenty-four sausage experts  don't eat it  at all; five only
eat high quality sausage or out of extreme hunger.  Only one, the
2-month-old kitten  Mura, you can  say actually sits  down to the
sausage,'' the  weekly Literaturnaya  Gazeta wrote  in announcing
the feline findings.
   Yu M. Luzhkov, chairman  of the Moscow agroindustrial complex,
demanded a retraction of the Gazeta's June 15 story charging that
producers  were  illegally  stuffing  protein  additives  in  the
sausage, known in Russian as ``kolbasa.''
   Gazeta said the  factories stuffed anything  into the kolbasa.
``Blocks of frozen  meat weren't unfrozen  or washed before being
chopped, and were happily  thrown in with knots  of wool and even
the  trademarks  of  the factories  that  produced  these blocks.
Nails, sand and glass have fallen into the sausage,'' it said.
   ``May the Cats Judge Us,'' Literaturnaya Gazeta replied to the
meatpackers'  complaint, and  said it  obtained  a jury  from the
Fauna Cat Lovers'  Club in Dzerzhinsky region,  where it is being
sued.
   Boris  Berenshtein  fed  some  of  the  ``gray, unappetizing''
sausage to Kuzya, his 2 1/2-year-old cat, ``but Kuzya didn't find
any joy in it.   Just the opposite, he gave  a look like a person
saying,  `What's  that for?   What  did  I do  that  was  so bad,
master?'''
   In the  end, out  of 30  cats, only  Mura the  kitten eats the
sausage  regularly,  Literaturnaya  Gazeta  said,  implying  that
because of its age, the kitten didn't know better.
   The case also shows the  more aggressive style of reporting by
the Soviet press under glasnost.

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