Where most vegetarians have considered the difference between a pig or a dog and decided to eat neither, on his new BBC4 series, Cooking in the Danger Zone, Stefan Gates examined a culture that goes the other way.
In a sense, that people could eat dogs reinforces the potential value of companion animals (a notion that has inspired one of Animals Asia's projects), which, though still a type of subservient relationship, creates an opportunity to make an impression of animals as more than mere commodities, much less food. Once you've shared a bond of sorts with a dog, for instance, it's a lot harder to conceive of eating one, and I'd be surprised if truly befriending any farmed animal would make it easier for a person to eat those again.
The bottom line is that the distinction between who we call our friends and who we eat is rather arbitrary, as is also made evident in my previous post on the horse slaughter bill, and by the Korean attitudes that allow for the consumption of one and a half million dogs every year.
Once one accepts that no animals ought to be bred, killed and/or consumed by humans where it is by no means necessary, of course one would naturally eliminate not just horses and dogs from the menu, but also pigs, cows, chickens, and so on, not to mention bush meat and other flesh foods most Westerners find perplexing, to say the least.
(Once again, thanks are in order to Joellen Secondo for the tip)
Labels: animal ethics, companion animals, dogs, pets
