Should There Be a worldwide Moratorium on eating dog meat ?

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I've always been a dog person. I currently own an Italian greyhound. I find telling a foreign culture what they can and can't eat ridiculous.
To Americans, dogs are a companion. To Hindu, cows are sacred. You don't hear them making a big deal.

It's always been glaringly obvious to me, too. Livestock can be seen as objects only while pets are given status very close, if not complete, human.
I eat meat but I admit it's an ugly necessity of life and I look around and see non humans eating meat, too, and no one hassles them about it! Why should anyone be hassled for eating meat? I have tried to eat a vegan diet but I just can't do it. I just see eating meat as part of what we have to put up with as human beings. If I had my way, I would wave a magic wand, making us all vegans without any kind of meat cravings, indigestion or feeling like I am missing out on nutrients. I can't be satisfied with just eating a vegan diet at the present time. I can't even handle anything more than a smidgen of fruit or vegetable juice anyway. Something is up with my system and I don't digest certain vegetables well at all. It runs in my mother's family. We all have issues with different ones. My mom can't eat onions or beans without severe indigestion. I can't drink much fruit juice and sometimes have problems with onions and beans but not as bad as her. If I cook them really thoroughly, I tend to do alright. Other family members cannot eat kale without severe gas. No one talks about how difficult it is to digest these vegetables when they talk about how healthy they are although I find making sure they are thoroughly cooked tends to help break down whatever's in them that causes it, except for the kale. Also, with onions, the body odor when the body metabolizes it - well, some people can eat them and be just fine, no odors, no gas, no stomach pains. Then there's ones who have this terrible odor just from eating raw onion in a smoothie or something. Liquid salads. It's a really intense sulfuric odor that I cannot handle being around without gagging and I feel bad about it because it cannot be helped but that is one odor that does me in. My aunt cooks this squash soup that's really good but it has a whole white onion in it and even though she cooks, strains, purees, then cooks some more, when this one family member eats the soup, the onion metabolizes and creates a extremely pugnant, unpleasant smell that I cannot handle being around even though I feel rude as hell about it and don't like reacting to it. So I politely requested, please, only half an onion, and the odor wasn't as strong but it was still there. I am able to deal with it better though.

I have a lot of digestive issues with these vegetables I don't have with meat. And then there's this mold that can grow on stuff like tomatoes or cumquats, especially, and if there's even a tiny tiny bit growing on the surface of something, not even enough to really be able to see, it will cause me the worst kind of indigestion imaginable so I have to be really careful. Also, the histamine in citrus causes my legs to break out in itchy hives.

I have a friend / former coworker who grew up in Beijing. Relatively poor, it seems. He once told me that when he was a boy he owned one single shirt, and it was white. He put it on in the morning before he went to school, and he took it off again when he got home. And if he got it dirty he was in big trouble.

He also told me stories about dispatching chickens for dinner when he was only 4. Had his own penknife for the job. Blade about a centimeter and a half long, razor sharp. That led to a whole discussion about how chinese people prefer their meat to be exsanguinated - they feel it has a better flavor if it is bloodless when cooked. It's not about not wanting to eat blood. They eat the blood too, from some animals anyway, cooked separately.

Anyway, we were walking in a park one day. Park has a large pond. There are these geese that live there. Variety we call a "chinese goose" here, though he assures me that nobody in china has ever seen one that looks like that. It's a domesticated species, but apparently living wild.

He told me, "those geese are very smart. Very hard to get close to them with a knife." -- followed a whole story about how one night he and a friend thought they looked tasty and tried to get one. You can walk right up to them with both hands open, but with one hand behind your back, or a knife or stick or net in one hand, they always run away.

Then he chuckled and said "I think chinese people, more than most, when they see an animal, they think 'how do i eat that?'".

Then there was the other time when he remarked that back home in Beijing there are so few birds. "Because of the pollution?" "No, because people eat them!"

I don't think there should be a ban on eating dog any more than there should be a ban on eating horse or a ban on eating heifer.

But I side with Tony Bourdain -- "I don't want animals stressed or overcrowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them provably less delicious. And often less safe to eat."

I don't believe in worldwide moratoriums. Let each country govern its own internal affairs.
I adore dogs and prefer thier company over humans. My dog is spoiled rotten and so was the one before him. I'm also actively a Humane Society Volunteer.

That aside, in some third world countries with an abundance stray of dogs that may be thier only source of meat.

To each their own tastes. I couldn't eat anything with a pet status, but different parts of the world have varying requirements, pets are a luxury possession. The act of livestock farming is also something that seems like a similar outlook, a farmer helps bring them into the world, cares for them, looks after them when ill, and then sends them off to the slaughter house. I view the "if there is meat to be had" ethos as being more in touch with traditional ways of life.

why a moratorium? As long as one owns the dog and slaughters it humanely why should there be a law against it?

We are a meat eating species, so why forbid a particular kind on non-human meat?

ruveyn

That's not why they eat dogs.

Well, it might be why some of them eat dogs.

There are farms where dogs are raised for meat. Not to be confused with tanuki - which are more like a giant raccoon. Sometimes translated as "raccoon dog" when the reality is more "raccoon the size of a dog".

otoh -

A friend of mine in texas - he says he used to have these cambodian neighbors. And about once a year, there would be a sudden, sharp decline in feral cats around the neighborhood, and everyone was invited over for kebabs. Said they were very cognizant of which cats were pets. Also that the kebabs were tasty.

I used to have a french coworker. Told me he had cat, and liked it, apparently. Said there was a good chinese restaurant in his neighborhood in Toulouse. Then he graduated from college and got a job that took him to ireland for a few years. When he got back, no more restaurant. His friends say "Oh that one? Turns out they were serving alley cat." - he didn't believe them until they showed him the newspaper stories.

Horse, on the other hand. Horse breeders produce a nontrivial number of horses that, for one reason or other, aren't race horses and aren't well suited to a life with humans. How good they are at predicting suitability for racing is up for debate because the application of science in the culling process is a bit lacking, but suffice to say that plenty of horses are born that are not destined for the track, and which you would not desire to give to a person as a gift for casual riding.

Slaughtering and processing horses into horse meat for both animal and human consumption used to be a 1 billion dollar a year industry in the USA. American Mustang is a premium horse meat in Asia, the Mediterranean, and eastern Europe.

PETA comes along with a heartbreaking story about mean people eating Flicka and now all those horses get on a train and go to Mexico to be processed into horse meat and sold around the world. Technically, in texas, if a horse dies, you are legally expected to BURY it. Nobody does this. Mostly they get dumped somewhere in the wild to be eaten by crows, etc.

Real salami is made out of horse. Originally anyway. I hear that horse salami is great. Back in the day, before the ban, my friend in texas had a pony that had a heart defect. One morning, it had keeled over dead. First thing that came to his mind was "Sausage!" -- apparently his daughter had been thinking "funeral" and didn't speak to him for about six months, while he worked his way through a freezer full of horse.

Belgians used to prefer frying potatoes in horse fat. That's probably not so common anymore.

There was a big debacle over here a few years ago about boxed lasagna. Apparently, the quality control had been iffy during production, and some less-than reputable slaughterhouses had provided the meat. Turns out the meat wasn't bovine at all, but rather that of romanian wild horses. The taste was fine, but some people were outraged because horses are pretty and cows aren't (so you don't eat them), while some other people were miffed because they want to know what they eat (i.e. if the packaging had said it was horse, they wouldn't have cared.). Funnily enough, now that it's a few years later, proper cuts of horse meat has turned up in the deli isle. It seems people got a taste for it...

I don't think you should ban eating dog. But I do think the idea that a suffering animal is a tastier animal is a toxic one. We could debate the ethics of animal husbandry till the proverbial cows come home, but at least western animal farming hasn't got the element of intentional cruelty. There is no benefit to be had from miserable animals.

After we sold my horse, the one who didn't let anyone but me ride her, my dad joked that she was going to a slaughterhouse to be made into sausage (she didn't; she became a brood mare).

Why is it that people don't want to eat "pretty" or "cute" things? I can understand not eating someone's personal pet, but strays should be fair game.
Makes me wonder, if humans were cannibals, would people like us, the socially unacceptable, get eaten first?

It's more than likely related to what people find "attractive" in the first place: big expressive eyes and rounded features says "baby", and we don't eat babies, we protect them. This impulse sort of misfires when we're talking about, say, a deer about to become dinner.

However, in the case of dogs, horses and cats, I think the disinclination to eat them comes from our long use of these animals not related to eating. Horses are your transport, don't eat them. Dogs are you guards and your hunting partner, don't eat them. Cats are you pest control, don't eat them. Not eating these animals brought more success than doing so, and so we developed a reflexive dislike of the idea.

That being said, many places have problems with wild dogs and feral cats, and I'm gioven to understand that horse breeders produce many more horses than can actually be used for their various purposes. Therefore, I'd see making food out of them to be making use of a commodity that would otherwhise go to waste.

If it's sold openly as such I would have no problem with it, though I would definately avoid it, and any place that sold it or served it. (Korea and China have special Dog meat restaurants)

If it was sold as some other meat then I would have major issues with it even though I have eaten at some really rank Chinese places where the 'beef' was definately dodgy.

FWIW, I've probably also unkowingly eaten cat as well masquerading as something bovine, and this would pose less of a problem with me if they were honest about what they were selling.