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santiago

Why wouldnt you eat a dog

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It was raining on the first day of the Ashes cricket test series and SBS filled time in with a program about a BBC reporter who travelled to Korea and was going to take an unbiased view on whether he would eat dog or not.

Most of us have probably grown up in an era where we make fun of asians for eating cats or dogs when more than likely its probably a tiny tiny minority who do and would be highly unlikely to happen within Australia itself. But thats not really the point. So the eating of dog has been around for thousands of years in parts of Asia, notably this documentary centred on Korea.

The program showed from a western point of view the breeding of dogs, dog farms, how they are cut up and executed for meat, dinner and prep of the meat for service at the dinner table. It was big big news in Korea as they have had many western attempts from journalists that have only made fun of and shed their culture in a very negative way. This latest BBC journo was even bigger news as he was actually going to eat dog. The dog meat was prepared into a meal for him twice and he even remarked that it looked and smelt delicious however on both occasions declined due to 'moral' reasons.

As a westerner myself it was a fantastic program and showed terrific insight into the cultural differences and to be blatent the ignorance most westerners have in regards to such a simple thing like food. I really dont get why this BBC reporter didnt just eat some dog. Probably had his reasons, it would have been great to see from a high nosed english point of view how it tasted. He probably would have been shamed out in the british class society so chose not to but it would have made excellent and informed viewing.

I personally really dont see the difference between eating a dog as to eating a pig, or a cow a rabbit or whatever animal roams the earth. Essentially it is just meat so what makes one more morally correct than the other, what just because a dog is apparently mans best friend, it can fetch a stick ! Why do we have such biased opinions on something as simple as a bit of dog stew.

If as was reported it looked and smelt great i suppose if i can add my opinion, possibly i will get nailed for this but thats life, i if presented in that country a nice plate of dog i think i would be most welcolm to eating it.

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I was in China and came across a fair bit of dog in the markets. Kinda confronting seeing a side of dog of a table , any way decided i had to try it and went to a restaurant that specialised in dog and mouse (go figure ?) got to the door read the menu but just couldn't go through with it. Maybe there were too many other options ? I have no problem with the idea but mentally i was repulsed and that was enough to put me off.

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I was in China and came across a fair bit of dog in the markets. Kinda confronting seeing a side of dog of a table , any way decided i had to try it and went to a restaurant that specialised in dog and mouse (go figure ?) got to the door read the menu but just couldn't go through with it. Maybe there were too many other options ? I have no problem with the idea but mentally i was repulsed and that was enough to put me off.

Very interesting 2b and a welcolm opinion. It must be confronting because you see a dog as a friend, however what is it about a dog that mentally repulses you in regards to simple meat eating, is eating a dog dirty and if so what about a pig rolling around in its own filth and scum, the caged madness of 100000 chickens with cysts that burst and combine with the shit and ticks to combine together to form our lovely morning bacon and eggs?

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I have heard a story that restaurants that served roast dog meat in older times served you a free yougurt at the end, because it supposedly covered up the smell and taste of the burb, said to be stinky...

I thought I could contribute. nice topic ! .... . ... .. .

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I think it is understandable that people don't like eating species they have some sort of emotional attachment to. However, that doesn't give them the right to stop others from doing so purely on 'moral' grounds.

I also think it is pathetic for a journalist to do a balanced doco but to have so much bias that he can't even try it. Seriously, good journalists will eat scorpions, cockroaches, snake, various testicles, and anything else that they are reporting on - or don't bother reporting!

My ONLY gripe with dog meat and especially the way it is done in korea is about the 'pretreatment'. I have posted about this here before because it is actually of pharmacological interest. The best dog meat is from a dog that has been tortured for a long time. One favourite method is to string the dog up by its collar into a low branch of a tree, so that the dog can just reach the ground with the hind legs. Then take a big stick and whack the dog hard. It will be in pain and will struggle to free itself. This is done for between 10 minutes and over one hour. The resulting meat is said to 'have real kick' and one can only assume that it is the massive amount of adrenaline that the dog produces under stress which causes this. Dog meat with 'kick' is the most popular and expensive, and while it is probably not the most common way of consuming it, there is certainly a large enough market for it.

The chinese have quite a general belief that stress improves meat quality, and as a general rule cruelty equates to stress. It is quite common for chinese to skin animals without actually first killing them. The pain from the live-skinning is seen as the ultimate in torture and hence the ultimate in meat improvement. The animals is dazed, but conscious. They breathe and blink and try to move for several minutes after being skinned. It is clear that the chinese do not differentiate between our companion animals and for example fur trade animals.

 

So, once again, I have no problem with different cultures having different species as food animals, but I do have a problem with unneccessary cruelty [and that includes the cruelty other countries impose on their pigs, cattle, chickens, etc]

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Stress improving meat quality is quite a thought! Personally, the meat I have always felt the best after is free-range kangaroo. So I'm not sure how that works, maybe a blind KFC-test would show that more people prefer KFC battery-chooks to free-range KFC chooks. Whatever, it's all about whether the 11 herbs and spices are organically grown, isn't it? :)

But on the subject of journalists not fulfilling the story with that last ultimate action, I was reminded of a famous documentary that I saw a couple of years ago about the lotus in egyptian culture. Everything was there: pharmacognocists, ethnobotanists, but as they put the flower to their lips the program ended! The fuckers never went even near ingesting the thing! Pharmacognosy my ass.

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Sounds like you may have possibly seen it Torsten.

I remember now. The show was called "Cooking in the danger zone". I was very disappointed he didnt eat it in the end as it showed what might possibly be percieved as a racist view of food.

True as you say the beating of animals but they didnt mention adrenaline i think, however its probably true. The traditional was was to hang it via a noose ie hanging slow strangulation and beating with a stick, apparently the dog still thinking man was his friend wimpers and struggles to the end letting out a last cry still even to the point of second before death. Sad but true. Now they stick them in a metal cage and electrocute them.

Im not sure how they kill cows and pigs, dont they just hang upside down on a chain with all their buddies behind them to have throats sliced, bleed to death in panic and then clinically cut up into little pieces.

However to take us back to a happier place didnt Bruce Lee eat cats, im sure i saw him do it.....he is not my hero but cat is next on my menu....i reckon that would be a chewy little fucker.

How about prawns and crayfish, basically your just eating big big insects similar to cockroaches and fleas, just underwater and salty.

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On a side note it is very wasteful & not environmentaly friendly.

Dogs are carnivores & its not very sustainable to eat carnivores when you could just eat what ever it is they eat.

I tried not eating tuna for a while there but I can't help myself I just got sick of sardines & herrings...

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A friend of mine was in China, and ate dog, he said the taste was similar to bacon.

I am reasonably comfortable with the idea of eating dog meat, but the concept of encoraging stress is disgusting to me. I can get my head around the concept the the dogs are bred for food, and not pets, but FFS dispatch them quickly so they dont even know what hit them.

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No way am I clicking the links, I have seen enough animal cruelty in my time. How do we educate people not to make animals suffer?

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Its safe, rogdog. Thats a dialogue scene from Tarantinos Pulp Fiction. I would never eat dog nor cat nor mouse nor rat. Plus a myriad other animals. the Reason i couldnt eat dog is that i wouldnt want to eat an animal with such a friendly and loyal character. They deserve better. Well, at least most of them. I´d rather eat an animal-torturing human than a dog! :P

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Well you can say that again, I would certainly take interest in eating human meat, maybe a cop's thigh or something. It is said to taste like pork meat.

MOTEL HELL [great horror comedy] as well as CHAINSAW MASSACRE saga do have direct involvement with cannibalism.

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it's an interesting question, something that's pretty hard to answer for me. At times it feels logical, but then i question if i'm just being defensive and stuck in my ways?...

I sort of view it as a species that's worked along side us for a long time, it's been a producer and protector, something that helps out and creates companionship, but i'm finding it hard to differentiate in words how things like cows, roos, monkeys etc. would be different as they do fulfill very similar roles and many keep them as companions and have connections to them in the same way as a dog, yet at the same time they are still restricted to an extent and can't really achieve as easily all that a dog would to benefit our survival, i mean it'd be hard to take a cow hunting, but not to say it couldn't be done in the right circumstance :P But i also don't see us milking dogs.

I might even put the question to myself, why would a culture eat a dog. Has it come about from when food was scarce and was just a needed option, or was it a specific choice to eat it even when an abundance of wild game like deer and fish were around?

To me it often comes down to mass overpopulation of humans, I suppose i still think of them as something that works along side humans to go out and find food, but once the carrying capacity of the land is broken and natural systems degraded we turn on the animal as it's the step before we start to eat our human friends and family, anything for survival of each persons genetic line.

I definitely see the torture aspect as completely fucked and unnecessary, more of a greedy indulgence and to me that is what really brings humans out as a squallered (is the word i'm looking for?) species. I think if we are to eat meat, the taking of the life should be as quickly and painlessly done as possibly, with a big emphasis on the realisation of the species of what is happening being more or less nil. I don't think i'd like being beaten or skinned alive and kept kicking for as long as possible so i can't see why any other species would be different. There seems to be a big lack of connection to the natural world, which specifically to me seems to be a big lack of connection and awareness of the individual themselves as we are the natural world.

But at the end of it besides the torture aspects, it does seem justification of taking one species over another.

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Santiago, the killing of other animals is for the most part quick and in many countries relatively humane. It's usually the transport and final hours before the killing that cause a lot of distress to the animal, but this has also been addressed in some EU countries now.

Cows are generally killed by having a sharp bolt rammed into their head much like a gun shot. It is as quick as a perfectly placed bullet. I think pigs are done the same way. Not sure about sheep. It's only halal/kosher butchery that requires the slitting of the throat of the live animal. This is often done after the animal is hoisted upside down. Again, you have to ask yourself about the cultural values where the religious requirements override the welfare of the animal.

I am not saying that we are any less cruel to our animals. I am sure an australian battery chicken would probably gladly trade places with a chinese dog. Non-mulesed sheep and most cattle in australia probably have it pretty good right up to a few days before they get killed. Kangaroo usually don't know anything other than a perfect life right to the moment it's over. So it's really only chickens and pigs where cruelty is systemic in the production throughout their whole life.

On the topic of adrenaline in meat, I had a friend who suffered from severe anxiety. This was controlled fairly well by medication, but would flare up almost every night after dinner. he thought it was the process of chewing that made him anxious, but after some trial and error he worked out it was in fact SOME types of meat. And by types I mean not the differentiation between pork and beef etc, but simply some pieces would give him problems while others wouldn't. He switched to organic thinking it might be a chemical additive or antibiotic, but even though this helped a little it did not eliminate it. he then ate some meat that neighbours had killed, ranging from chicken and beef to roo and goat. He had no anxiety from these. One of the local farmers then gave him 2 batches of meat. one from the abbatoir and one from a homekill - both animals from the same herd. The abbatoir animal caused anxiety while the homekill one did not. All these trials indicate quite strongly that it was the abbatoir processing [including transport and cattle prodding] that caused the meat to become anxiogenic.

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All these trials indicate quite strongly that it was the abbatoir processing [including transport and cattle prodding] that caused the meat to become anxiogenic.

So instead of long blacks I can have a kilo of Home Brand short cut bacon or something? Messed up.

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I dont have any issues eating dog, i think the taste is a little gamey but more dependant on the cook than anything. I only draw the line at close lations = fruit bats. ewwww nasty

as for stressed meat being best what a load of bollocks, stressed meat is tough meat. better a quick clean kill & a nice sweet cut than have it cut dark any day.

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as for stressed meat being best what a load of bollocks, stressed meat is tough meat. better a quick clean kill & a nice sweet cut than have it cut dark any day.

stressed meat is only tough if it is long term stressed. Meat doesn't suddenly turn tough when an animals gets frightened. In fact, stress would increase the lactic acid in the muscle which would help to tenderise the meat [like marinating in yogurt].

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couldn't they just make it run around and do some squats and stuff? or yell insults about its mother

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Ok i changed my mind. Im gonna eat a dog NOW. I´m just babysitting my fathers spoiled dog and it drives me insane. :blink: I slept 2 hours this night and it doesnt get any better.

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lol EG, nothing worse than a spoiled little dog that barks at you every time you stand up.

Funny this thread popped up, after coming down from a big night on Saturday i was watching a show on nat geo about the weird things people eat around the world... i thought i was pretty open minded when it comes to food (i love offal, and rabbit) but a few things freaked me out especially dog. On the show they showed a club in America that eats all sorts of weird things around the world, reptiles, arachnids, even beaver (the animal).

The deep fried tarantula on a stick looked nice....said to taste like a soft shelled crab.

Something just doesn't seem right eating dog, growing up on a sheep farm we always had at least 3 dogs and they were like family members who worked at least 12 hours a day. They were part of the family. I just couldn't get my head around eating one. Especially if they're treated the way T says.

I'd say the only things i would not eat (if offered) are dog, primates, and endangered species (which I think beaver is?). Otherwise, bring it on! :P

Anyone watch Bizarre Foods? That fat bald dude will eat anything :lol:

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I'd say the only things i would not eat (if offered) are dog, primates, and endangered species (which I think beaver is?). Otherwise, bring it on! :P

So you're fine with all these?

http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/cat_s...dont_eat_it.php :)

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