NEW ORLEANS - Take your 10-year-old to a Critter Dinner to eat all kinds of game in Louisiana's Fontainebleau State Park, and he might grow up to be a shameless carnivore. Scott Gold did.

Then at age 13 or 14, Gold went to Ruth's Chris Steak House in New Orleans for the first time and fell in love with the sizzle and the steak.

He is now a grown-up living in Brooklyn, where his friends can't believe that he ever ate nutria, a giant swamp rat with bright orange teeth.

"The fact it's our baseball team's mascot lends it even less credibility," Gold says.

In his first book, "The Shameless Carnivore: A Manifesto for Meat Lovers" (Broadway Books, $24.95), Gold explores the culinary delights of not only nutria, but also alligator, rattlesnake, wild boar, squab, guinea pig, his mother's turtle soup and all things meaty.

The New Orleans native's book is laugh-out-loud funny. But it's also quite thoughtful.

"I have a lot of vegetarian friends; my older brother is a vegetarian, and I talk about this a lot," Gold said by phone from his Brooklyn home. "I tried very hard, because I knew coming into this that talking about your love of meat is going to make certain people angry. I wanted to be as rigorous as I could, to take this seriously.

"I go out of my way to say, "If you want to be a vegetarian, fine, but I don't care for proselytizing or people telling me that my decisions about my diet are ethically inferior.' I'll go to the mat on that one."

If someone's going to talk a good game about being a shameless carnivore, Gold said, "you've got to test yourself in various ways."

For him, the biggest test came at a small family farm a couple hours outside New York City, where he helped a young family butcher their cow.

"It was a pretty deep and thought-provoking experience, going from meeting the animal and patting him on the head to driving back to the city with a cooler of beef and ribs and ground beef," Gold said. "It was probably the single most poignant experience I've had in the food world, and in my life, knowing the name of your steak."

His book is stuffed with facts - Americans consume 218.3 pounds of beef, chicken, turkey and pork annually - as well as meat science - flavor in meat comes mainly from fat and glutamate, and diet is directly reflected in flavor, which is why wild animals are usually tastier than domestic animals. There are scads of puns, which Gold says are in his DNA. The chapter on variety meats is titled "This Is Going to Be Offal."

Readers accompany Gold through his Month of Meat, eating 31 different meats, and go with him and his brother to the Testicle Festival in Missoula, Mont., celebrating deep-fried bull testes (aka Rocky Mountain oysters). Gold says this event was "like a crazy redneck mountain Mardi Gras ... the testicles were the least interesting part of the entire experience."

If Gold's background is informed by Louisiana, it is also shaped by his current world. He gets most of his exotic meats from a neighborhood butcher. He has found an Ecuadorian restaurant in Brooklyn where he and his friends dine on $30 cuy, guinea pig served whole, like a miniature suckling pig with an enraged expression on its face.

Of course, Gold includes a few recipes in his book:

If you're not raising yaks in your spare time, Gold says, you can substitute ground beef.

Makes about 50 dumplings

1 pound ground yak meat (or beef)

1 medium onion, finely chopped

One 2-inch piece ginger, peeled, finely grated

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 bunch fresh cilantro leaves, minced

½ pound cabbage, finely chopped

2 tablespoons soy sauce

2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon chili powder

1 package round dumpling (gyoza) wrappers

Combine all ingredients except the dumpling wrappers in a large mixing bowl. (Make sure all the produce is finely chopped; you don't want big hunks of onion or cabbage poking through your dumpling.) Mix everything thoroughly by hand.

Place a small amount of the filling onto a dumpling wrapper, no more than a tablespoon or so. Wet the outside edges of the wrapper with water (or egg white, if you prefer) and fold in half around the filling, making the classic half-moon shape. If you want to get fancy, you can take this a step further by folding this half-moon into a circle, joining the pointy ends, so you have a round, tortellini-shaped dumpling (good because they're smaller, and you can fit more into the steamer at a time).

Place the dumplings on an oiled steamer rack so they're not touching each other. Bring to a boil a small amount of water in a large, lidded pot with the steamer attachment inside. Steam dumplings for 10 minutes, until the wrappers crinkle up around the filling. Remove them to a serving dish and allow them to cool for a couple of minutes, since the filling will be extremely hot. Serve them with soy sauce or hot sauce for dipping.

Gold has used his favorite marinade on kangaroo meat, which is popular in Europe. Gold reports that kangaroo meat comes under the auspices of the Australian government and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which monitor native kangaroo populations and carefully cull the herds to ensure the animals' health and minimal impact on the surrounding environment.

Makes about 3 1/3 cups

1½ cups vegetable oil

3/4 cup soy sauce

1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce

2 tablespoons dry mustard

2½ teaspoons salt

1 tablespoon cracked black pepper

2 teaspoons chopped fresh parsley

1/2 cup red wine vinegar

3 garlic cloves, crushed

1/3 cup fresh lemon juice

1 tablespoon fresh lime juice

Combine all ingredients in a medium saucepan and place over low heat until simmering lightly (not foaming!), then cool completely. Place meat in a zip-top freezer bag, pour in the marinade, then seal tightly. Let sit in the refrigerator at least 4 hours, although overnight is best for tougher cuts or game.