Wednesday Whimsy meets the Victorian street vendor who fed London’s cats
Get your spoonful of “Wednesday Whimsy.” Meet the Cat’s Meat Man!
A cat’s meat man was a British street vendor who sold cheap meat for cats and dogs, becoming an especially familiar figure in London during thee 19th century. And despite the wonderfully alarming job title, he was not selling cats as meat. He was selling meat for cats.
That meat was often horse flesh and offal, cut into manageable pieces and carried through neighborhoods on handcarts. Customers could buy directly from the barrow, while some vendors maintained regular rounds and delivered to households along established routes.
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Meet the Cat’s Meat Man
Before tins, pouches and premium pet food aisles, London’s cats had neighborhood meat vendors making the rounds with horse meat and offal.
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Before Cat Food Came in Cans, It Came From a Cart
The trade sounds bizarre now, but in a city full of horses it made practical sense. Animals that died or were slaughtered could enter a secondary food chain for household pets, and specialist sellers emerged to get that meat from the slaughterhouse to the neighborhood cat.
Writer and social investigator Henry Mayhew documented the trade in London Labour and the London Poor in 1851. He estimated that London had roughly 1,000 cat’s meat vendors serving around 300,000 cats. One seller told Mayhew he regularly covered 30 to 40 miles of streets in a day. Suddenly your food-delivery driver has it easy.
The Cats Apparently Knew Exactly When Dinner Was Coming
The vendors developed regular “walks,” or routes, and the animals learned them. Contemporary accounts describe cats gathering around the carts as the meat men made their rounds, waiting for the possibility of dinner — or perhaps one lucky scrap hitting the pavement.
The best vendors could build an actual clientele and a dependable little business. Some routes were valuable enough to be sold to another trader, and by the end of the century women were also working the rounds. What sounds today like an odd footnote was, for decades, a small but real piece of London’s street economy.
Scenes From the Cat’s Meat Man Trade
Eventually, commercially prepared pet food helped send the cat’s meat man the way of so many old street trades. But for a stretch of British history, the sound of a vendor pushing a meat cart down the road could apparently summon the neighborhood cats faster than opening a modern tin.
Yummy in the animals’ tummy.
Watch Wednesday Whimsy Meet the Cat’s Meat Man
A quick trip into the wonderfully peculiar history of the British street vendors who once sold meat for household cats and dogs.
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Sources: The Public Domain Review; Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor.
