Prue Leith – the UK's most renowned restaurateur and caterer, a well-known TV cook, broadcaster and cookery writer – has shared a traumatic experience from childhood in her new memoir I'll Try Anything Once.
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Drown them!
Speaking to HuffPost UK, Leith shared the incident from her childhood when she had to drown some kittens because her mother told her to do so. She wrote in her book:
My mother and I, then 11, had just drowned some kittens… and for weeks I imagined those poor dead creatures.
Too many kittens was a frequent occurrence and there had come a day when my mother, unable to find homes for yet another litter, decided to drown the latest batch.
Apparently, she tried to talk her mother out of doing the dreadful deed, but she was met with a:
darling, it has to be done. They are only a few hours old. They will hardly know it’s happening.
Describing the event, she expressed that the kittens fought for their dear life and wrote:
I held the bag under the water until the last kitten had stopped mewing.
Why did she share the incident?
Her entire motivation for sharing the incident was to spread awareness. The incident happened in the 1940s when she was 11 years old and brought up on a farm in South Africa. Her mother was tired of the growing litter and the only way to get rid of the animals was to kill them.
However, things are different now and there are more ways than one to stop the growing litter. Leith added:
I wrote about it honestly in my book, as an 11-year-old it was an extremely traumatic experience, not one I would forget, however it is what happened 70 years ago.
Thankfully today in the UK we have the choice of neutering our cats and have more options to home kittens, although sadly in some parts of the world it is still an issue.
Sources Used
HuffPost: Prue Leith Reveals She ‘Drowned Some Kittens’ In A Bag As A Child
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