Friends or Food?
Thanks to the Grumpy Vegan for pointing to the Animals Asia Foundation. Dog eating is an issue in Asia. Sometimes it takes seeing a victim you can recognize before you can really begin to see the rest. The cross comes to mind but that’s a long Girardian tangent for another day.
A tidbit from the Friends or Food? faq:
- What is fundamental to the practice of dog and cat eating is that the cruelty is often deliberate and slaughter methods are designed to intensify and prolong the suffering in the misguided belief that “torture equals taste”.
- In situations where the torture is not deliberate, the method of slaughter is still tragically cruel. Markets in China employ killing methods that leave both dogs and cats suffering a lingering, violent death as they are either bludgeoned over the head, stabbed in the neck or groin, hanged, electrocuted or thrown conscious into drums of boiling water.
Check out the Friends or Food? campaign here.
A pictorial of the process of dog slaughter for meat in Vietnam (unrelated to the Animals Asia campaign, but informative nonetheless). The photographer notes that
“Food dogs” are not pets and they have no names. They are bred and raised in farms, just like pigs, cows, lambs, chickens and other farm animals. They are put down “humanely” just like any other farm animal, usually by slitting the throat and beeding the animal until it passes out.
The issue of dog meat points most clearly to the arbitrariness of our designations of “food” animals. The inherent properties of dogs don’t change based on the label we put on them. It does point to the linguistic shift we have to make in order to treat animals like things. It’s not the reality of the subject that changes but we have to do a linguistic move, a conceptual move in order to treat them a certain way. The same is true for cows and pigs and chickens. Just because we choose to not know them doesn’t mean they can’t be known as the individuals they are.
