Is It Wrong to Eat Dogs?

BY SOFO ARCHON

This is the transcript of a spontaneous talk.

When Westerners hear stories about people from, let’s say, some Asian countries eating dogs, they freak out. They are disgusted. They’re like, “How can those people be so cruel, so inhumane? How can they be eating dogs?”

Yet the same people who utter those words are themselves eating animals that are as sentient as dogs. They are eating cows and pigs, yet they have absolutely no problem doing that. They don’t feel cruel, they don’t feel that they are inhumane, because they have been doing that for their entire lives, and everyone around them is doing the same thing. Eating those animals is considered normal in their culture. But eating dogs? No, that’s a bad thing to do, it’s wrong!

But there is no fundamental difference between a dog and a cow or a pig or a chicken. People here in the West say, “Well, dogs have a soul, they have a personality. They are unlike cows and pigs that are just food for humans.” But that’s because they are not emotionally connected to cows and pigs and chickens, because in the West most people don’t have those animals as pets or companions like they have dogs, so they have not developed an intimate connection to the animals that they eat.

People who have pigs and chickens and cows as pets know very well that those animals have personalities as well. That they can feel joy and pain, that they like to connect with other animals and with human beings. People who have those animals as pets grieve when they lose them, or they feel happy when those animals are joyful.

But those animals are hidden from most of us. They are hidden in farms and slaughterhouses, where they are being exploited and abused and eventually killed and chopped into pieces so that we can eat them, when we don’t really need to. Most of us, at least here in the West, don’t need to eat meat to survive or to be healthy. So before we condemn those people from other cultures for eating dogs, before we accuse them and judge them and point our fingers at them, we need to look into our own actions, into our own food choices, into our own cruelty.

Every year, about 60 billion land animals are being killed so that we humans can eat them, and only a tiny percentage of that number is dogs. Most is chickens and pigs and cows. And I’m not saying that eating dogs is okay or that we should not try to ban the consumption of dogs, but it is hypocritical to try to do that when we ourselves are contributing to the suffering and death of so many other animals, day in and day out.

Again, there is no fundamental difference between dogs and the animals that we eat here in the West, so why do we choose to eat the animals that we eat and not dogs?

I will leave you with this question to ponder.