-
Indeed there was, and it was delicious. Very tender. But that may have been because it was a very young and tender yak, "Murray" by name.
The original plan was to shecht a giraffe. That would have been a spectacular piece de resistance, and would have put to rest forever all those rumours that circulate underground about why we "don't" eat it. The OU's poskim approved, in principle. Then they ran into the real reason why we don't eat giraffe: they're expensive, not very tasty, and most of all there's no secondary market it on which one could dispose of excess meat. In the USA, a giraffe costs about $25K. No problem, they found a sponsor. Someone really wanted this to happen.
But what, asked the rabbonim, if we spend all that money, shecht it, and find it to be treif? When this happens to a steer, as it does regularly, no problem; we send it over to the treif side of the slaughterhouse. Who is going to buy a ton or so of treife giraffe? So, they decided, they'd only do it if they could locate a specimen under a year old, so it hasn't had a lot of time to develop treifos. The exotic animal dealers could not supply such an animal. So they decided to do without it, and substitute a yak.
They found a yak farmer in North Dakota, and went over his entire inventory to locate the specimen with the least chance of being treif. Murray was the healthiest-sounding yak in the herd, so he was dinner, and proved to be, as Rabbi Seth Mandel put it, "kelben glatt" -- smooth as a calf, in other words he had perfectly smooth lungs.
-
-
