Comment by mananaysiempre

> Much more recently I heard on QI about how medieval people, not knowing about migration, believed, through a lot of leaps, that it was ok to eat barnacle geese at lent.

There’s a similar story about how rabbits in Japanese use the classifier 羽 (-wa, “wing”) normally utilized for birds, instead of the 匹 (-hiki) you’d expect for small animals, because Buddhist monks really wanted to eat them and thus declared their ears to be wings. I don’t know how historically accurate that is. (I’m also assuming this has to come from Chinese and thus likely also has a counterpart in Korean, but can’t prove that with a cursory look through Wiktionary.)