Eating dog

Dogs have come under attack in 2 recent op-ed articles. Jonathan Safran Foer in the WSJ asks why don't we eat dogs and Jonah Goldberg, in his normal nonsense way, pivots off an idea in a new book entitled, "Time to Eat the Dog?: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living", to make the claim that environmentalists want to take away your dogs and that we shouldn't worry about climate change because it is politically impossible and we'll just reflect sunlight back to space when it gets bad. Not joking. There are some interesting thoughts in both, though I wouldn't wish anyone to actually read the Jonah Goldberg article. The Safran Foer article is genuinely interesting. Here's JSF -

Of course, something having been done just about everywhere is no kind of justification for doing it now. But unlike all farmed meat, which requires the creation and maintenance of animals, dogs are practically begging to be eaten. Three to four million dogs and cats are euthanized annually. The simple disposal of these euthanized dogs is an enormous ecological and economic problem. But eating those strays, those runaways, those not-quite-cute-enough-to-take and not-quite-well-behaved-enough-to-keep dogs would be killing a flock of birds with one stone and eating it, too.

In a sense it's what we're doing already. Rendering—the conversion of animal protein unfit for human consumption into food for livestock and pets—allows processing plants to transform useless dead dogs into productive members of the food chain. In America, millions of dogs and cats euthanized in animal shelters every year become the food for our food. So let's just eliminate this inefficient and bizarre middle step.

...

Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving and identity. Responding to factory farming calls for a capacity to care that dwells beyond information. We know what we see on undercover videos of factory farms and slaughterhouses is wrong. (There are those who will defend a system that allows for occasional animal cruelty, but no one defends the cruelty, itself.) And despite it being entirely reasonable, the case for eating dogs is likely repulsive to just about every reader of this paper. The instinct comes before our reason, and is more important.

I think that I could eat dog. At least try it. I drink milk that comes from a cow's tit, which when I think about I find rather disgusting, but not disgusting to the point that I'll stop drinking milk. Compared to that, dog meat seems like a rather clean and rational thing to do. I don't think I'd feel any moral repulsiveness if I came across "Doberman" in a meat freezer (although it'd be highly amusing in a macabre way if you could memorialize dogs on their food label, like under the price it'd say "Daisy, Yellow Lab, Occasionally drank beer left in her dog dish by owners, Walked semi-occasionally, Displayed symptoms of mental deficiencies, Was a good dog, Defrost before grilling", you could collect dog meat price stickers like baseball cards). There is a sense of revulsion, though, that I have when I think about what a dog slaughterhouse would exist as, which is strange because I just accept that millions of dogs are already put to death yearly. I never thought that they used the body for animal feed; I guess I just assumed they put all the euthanized dogs into dog caskets and buried them in dog graves or cremated the dogs and put the dogs into little dog urns. Anyway, after watching The Cove I feel like a slight hypocrite being a carnivore and then making distinctions between what animals are morally acceptable to kill and which aren't - so I should be a vegetarian but I'm, y'know, lazy...

And here's Jonah Goldberg -

The government cannot have my dog.

Don't tell that to the authors of the new book, "Time to Eat the Dog?: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living." The authors calculate that dog owning is much worse than SUV driving for the planet. So when you see a car heading to the dog park with some very happy labs drooling out the window, you should think "climate criminals."

Meanwhile, in less surprising news, cats (long known as the handmaidens of Satan) have roughly the ecological paw print of a Volkswagen Golf.

Ditch the SUV, walk the dog.

And a nice dog story to end -

Not long before his death, Harry and I headed out for a walk that proved eventful. He was nearly 13, old for a big dog. Walks were no longer the slap-happy Iditarods of his youth, frenzies of purposeless pulling in which we would cast madly off in all directions, fighting for command. Nor were they the exuberant archaeological expeditions of his middle years, when every other tree or hydrant or blade of grass held tantalizing secrets about his neighbors. In his old age, Harry had transformed his walk into a simple process of elimination—a dutiful, utilitarian, head-down trudge. When finished, he would shuffle home to his ratty old bed, which graced our living room because Harry could no longer ascend the stairs. On these walks, Harry seemed oblivious to his surroundings, absorbed in the arduous responsibility of placing foot before foot before foot before foot. But this time, on the edge of a small urban park, he stopped to watch something. A man was throwing a Frisbee to his dog. The dog, about Harry’s size, was tracking the flight expertly, as Harry had once done, anticipating hooks and slices by watching the pitch and roll and yaw of the disc, as Harry had done, then catching it with a joyful, punctuating leap, as Harry had once done, too.

Harry sat. For 10 minutes, he watched the fling and catch, fling and catch, his face contented, his eyes alight, his tail a-twitch. Our walk home was almost…jaunty.