It’s Christmas time again!
Get your hammers out, fill up your bathtub, and hit the streets!
Giant fish tanks are sitting in every neighborhood all over the Czech Republic, waiting for you to pick your slimy carp, dead or alive. If you have small children, you can bring them with you to watch the hammering, chopping, and scraping. Or, you can fill up your bathtub, bring your carp home, and let your kids give him a name in order to more ruthlessly teach them about the violent tendencies of nature (I mean hey, this is all natural, right?)
It’s a snowy time now in 2010, so the streets will have that extra horror movie-quality – blood splattered on the frosty sidewalks – who could ask for a more animalistic way to celebrate the coming of baby jesus?
Click on any of these images to open the high-resolution full-screen panoramas. Sorry about the stitching errors – we had to get these online in a hurry to spread our Czech holiday cheer all over the world in time for christmas! 🙂
360Cities Blog 
The headline certainly does not lack drama 🙂 Czechs are not scared by a bit of blood from what they eat. Good moral standing?
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Hi Pavel-helge,
Yes, it’s a strange artifact of the modern age that blood can be so off-putting. Still, I don’t think i’d like to watch cows and pigs getting decapitated outside every metro station in the city… maybe only for easter it would be ok?
Jeffrey
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I believe it’s healthy to learn where food comes from. It might look cruel, but we humans are omnivore predators after all.
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cannibals
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:-))))
What animals you eat, say to the Chinese.
All. Excluding aircraft.
——————————————-
Each plant has a soul. Breathe the air, sweet American Moby-Dick!
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Brings back childhood memories !
Over here in England they would probably have a Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Carp outlawing this.
This year I actually spotted carp for sale in our local Tesco – the sorry thing looked as if it’d been dead for weeks.
Perhaps all Czechs get reborn as carp as the wheel of karma rolls on 🙂
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A vy zas mlátíte černochy
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Já bych všechny ty kapry zakázala
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Může být rozum a chtíč v opozici natrvalo?
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Erm… So what? I don’t eat carps becase I don’t like fish, but it’s our tradition. I don’t think situation is as melodramatic as you have written. And personally, it quite offends me, you make us sound like savages. You kill lots of tukeys for Christmas, what’s the big deal?
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Hi Jeffrey,
I think that this experience is actually highly educational – majority of people nowadays lost the link between meat on their plate and death of the living animal. And actually, I dont think that it is cruel to have the carp professionally killed on the spot. What would be a matter of discussion is buying alive carp and carrying it back home, suffocating. But our ancestors had a method for that too – insert a piece of bread soaked in rum into the carps mouth to make it numb…
And as to the naming of the carp – only the stupid parents encourage their kids to name the animal that’s going to die in couple of days. That would be cruel to their childern.
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Hi katsumi-kagakusha,
There is nothing wrong with being a savage. That’s why I’ve lived here for so long 😉
Jeffrey
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I am Czech and I am and always will be a vegetarian. Thank God!
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