(CNN) -- The dog photos are difficult to view. Of course. They show man's best friend
being stuffed into wire cages
and trucked, illegally, across
borders in Southeast Asia. The
destination: restaurants in
Vietnam. That thought alone -- that
someone would sit in a public
restaurant and order dog
from a menu -- is likely
enough to get most "dog
people" to stop reading this column, much less look at the photo essay featured this
week by CNN's photo blog . Here in the Untied States, we
will spend $58.5 billion on pets this year, according to one
industry projection. We
pamper dogs with Christmas
presents; send them to
"doggie daycare"; bring them
on planes (more than 2 million pets and animals fly per year); and trot them around show
rings, judging the perfection
of their pedigree. Eat them? Unthinkable.
Repulsive. Cruel. We don't even
consider it. The images featured on the
CNN Photo Blog take viewers inside Southeast
Asia's illegal dog-meat trade.
Shot by Luke Duggleby , who traveled to Thailand, Laos and
Vietnam for the story, they're
well worth your attention. He
documents a trade that is
estimated to include hundreds
of thousands of dogs per year. The 36-year-old was born in
the U.K. and has been living in
Thailand for eight years. He
told me in an e-mail interview
that he considers himself a
"dog person" -- "I got an English sheepdog for my
fourth birthday and called him
Tom" -- and that made it
difficult to see the gruesome
realities of this trade, which is
illegal in Thailand because the exporters aren't paying taxes
or getting the dogs
vaccinated. "The dogs are illegally
smuggled out of Thailand --
that is the illegal part," he said.
"They pay no tax or duty. The
dogs aren't vaccinated nor do
they undergo quarantine. But once they get to Laos they are
legally allowed to travel ... on
the way to Vietnam, as the
officials aren't interested in it.
And once in Vietnam no part
of it is illegal." In a slaughterhouse, "the dogs
were beaten to death in front
of me," he said. I fear you'll see Duggleby's
photos and think only one
thing: How awful that people
in Vietnam would eat these
loveable, intelligent animals.
You'll do what I did, which is to imagine your dog, or your
childhood dog, in one of these
cages. You won't think about the
bigger picture. Which is this: The cruelty of
this trade -- the fact that dogs
are smashed into cages;
suffocated; " skinned alive, strung up and beaten," according to a CNN report -- is
what should shock and
sadden you. The fact that
people are eating dog meat?
That shouldn't. Unless you're
vegetarian or vegan -- I'm not, by the way , although I do try to eat relatively little
meat -- you don't have any
moral high ground to stand
on. Here in the United States, a
place with an unhealthy and
ridiculously hipster bacon obsession (witness: bacon
donuts, bacon pie, bacon in bloody marys), eating dog
could be seen as a reasonable
alternative to pig, which is
another highly intelligent
animal, capable of being a
companion to the likes of George Clooney. The United States euthanizes 1.2 million dogs per year , according to the ASPCA. Would eating them be so
different? It actually could be seen as
helpful. "[U]nlike all farmed meat,
which requires the creation
and maintenance of animals,
dogs are practically begging to
be eaten," Jonathan Safran
Foer, a vegetarian and novelist, writes in the book
"Eating Animals." Euthanizing
pets, he says, "amounts to
millions of pounds of meat
now being thrown away
every year. The simple disposal of these euthanized
dogs is an enormous ecological
and economic problem. It
would be demented to yank
pets from homes. 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." But wait: Dogs are
companions, right? Pigs
(mostly) are not. True, in America. In parts of Vietnam, not so much. In India, remember, cows are sacred. And eating pig is off limits
for many Muslim and
Jewish people. Plus, there's an inherent
danger in thinking that
"the value of an animal
depends on how you treat it," writes Slate's William Saletan. "If you befriend it, it's a
friend. If you raise it for food,
it's food," he says in a 2002
essay, hilariously titled "Wok
the Dog." "This relativism is
more dangerous than the absolutism of vegetarians or
even of thoughtful
carnivores. You can abstain
from meat because you
believe that the mental
capacity of animals is too close to that of humans. You can
eat meat because you believe
that it isn't. Either way,
you're using a fixed standard.
But if you refuse to eat only
the meat of 'companion' animals -- chewing bacon, for
example, while telling
Koreans that they can't stew
Dalmatians -- you're saying
that the morality of killing
depends on habit or even whim." Maybe the logic of that makes
sense but the thought of
eating dog still doesn't sit
well. That's the case for me. I
went to Vietnam earlier this
year to report a story on the illegal trade in pangolin, which is a scale-covered mammal
few people care about (except
me and maybe this guy ) in the way they care about dogs. I saw dog restaurants in
Hanoi. Easily could have gone
to one. I didn't. And that says less
about the dog-eating that's
going on in Hanoi than my
own conflicted eating habits.
Clearly, the illegal dog trade
needs to be cleaned up. But so does our thinking about what
we eat and when and why. If
we're appalled by the dog
trade in Southeast Asia, we
should be similarly appalled
by some of the conditions that exist in factory animal
farms in the United States --
including the use of "gestation crates" to confine mother pigs, a practice activist Temple
Grandin has criticized, saying
it's like " asking a sow to live in an airline seat." If we think dog shouldn't be
eaten -- like, ever, regardless
of how clean the trade is and
how quick the kill -- then
maybe we should think about
the other animals we eat, and if and why we don't feel the
same way about them. Is it
because we spend so much
time with dogs -- looking into
their eyes, talking to them,
walking them, picking up their crap -- that we
understand that they are
living, breathing, feeling
beings? Would we feel that
way about other animals if
we could hang out more? Or would the beak-y, frowny
face of the chicken still stop us
short of empathy? For his part, Duggleby, the
photographer who shot the
dog story, told me he was
offered dog meat on the
assignment but couldn't eat it. "When I was photographing
inside a dog meat restaurant --
claiming to be a chef studying
Vietnamese food -- I was
offered to try it," he said. "It
probably looked very odd for a 'chef' to say no but I turned
it down. I just couldn't bring
myself to try it." I likely would have done the
same thing. Exactly why? That's a harder
question. And it's the one all of us
should further examine.

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/23/opinion/sutter-dog-meat-ethics/?sr=fb072314dogmeatethics230pStoryLink

as much as i dont av any objections to some kind of meat. I can eat anything Meat, i still find it hard to imagine how Some meats are killed and prepared. What other manner to kill a canine without being cruel? Dog eaters (kogi, Ondo, Edo etc) any hint?

opeano: as much as i dont av any objections to some kind of meat. I can eat anything Meat, i still find it hard to imagine how Some meats are killed and prepared. What other manner to kill a canine without being cruel? Dog eaters (kogi, Ondo, Edo etc) any hint?

I wouldn't know about that.

Nobleval: I wouldn't know about that.

those that know will soon be here

opeano: those that know will soon be here

lets hope they do.

We can't all be like the Americans who see dogs as human equivalent.

Nobody(not even vegetarians) has the audacity to question what animal one chooses to eat.
If you say dogs are feeling beings, so are cows, goats, fish, pigs etc.
That goat you're about to kill is one man's best friend in another clime and if you choose not to eat flesh at all, good for you.

It is different strokes for different folks.

opeano: as much as i dont av any objections to some kind of meat. I can eat anything Meat, i still find it hard to imagine how Some meats are killed and prepared. What other manner to kill a canine without being cruel? Dog eaters (kogi, Ondo, Edo etc) any hint?

Canines and pigs are not like goats that you kill with a common knife or else you want to sustain mortal injuries, that's why you find people badgering them to death or shooting them in the case of pigs.