They eat kangaroo, do they? According to the BBC, it’s popular in Germany, France, and Belgium. But in Australia, not so much. Apparently, it’s an uphill battle selling marsupial meat to a nation for whom kangaroos are a sentimental national symbol.

The Australian kangaroo meat industry is tackling this challenge head-on by holding a contest to come up with another name, preferably one that skips over the fact that the product in question is kangaroo.

Possible alternatives? Well, there’s an Asian restaurant in Sydney where the menu lists a kangaroo dish with Chinese characters that, translated literally, mean “big rat.”

Hungry yet? Me neither. When I hear the word “kangaroo,” I think of two things, and neither of them is “dinner.” The first is Christopher Robin’s childhood playmate, Kanga (who, by the way, really exists and currently resides in a climate controlled plexiglass box with Pooh and their crew at a library in midtown Manhattan; sadly, her baby Roo was lost in an apple orchard in the 1930’s.) Second, I think of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, once a popular kids’ show in Australia, now a popular political blog.

We meat eaters are admittedly pretty arbitrary about what animals we’ll eat. As a student in France, I couldn’t bring myself to eat rabbit or horse. Pigeon doesn’t appeal to me, either. I’m with columnist Bill Ferguson, whose take on the Aussie dilemma concludes with a list of the animals he won’t eat: people, simians, dogs, anything at the zoo, and insects, with or without chocolate coating.

Just one thing, Bill: you don’t say anything about cats. That’s just an oversight, right?