Letters to the Editor
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kenwolman question
kenwolman: You do not kill and eat somethingn with a soul that can talk to yours if you are not so closed-off and ignorant that you can't sense it's there.
I read two things in Kenwolman's comment. First, the Chinese are closed-off and ignorant. Better add the Koreans, who also famously (in Western media) consume dog. And that's just the beginning: so big a world, so many ignorant races, ethnicities and creeds.
Second, Kenwolman asserts the existence of a soul - of an ontological thing independent of the electrical, chemical and other material processes of the brain. Like Gautama Buddha, I don't agree with that.
But apart from that, no "soul" is needed to construct an argument for humans to categorise and imagine special types of relationships to nonhuman species - which species should be used for food, which are the forebears of totemic clans, which are appropriately deified, which should be endowed with human characteristics, which are to be demonised, which are visible or invisible. That is just normal discursive social process.
Dog and cat societies organise themselves by tooth and claw. They kill members of their own and other species for both food and "sport". Ask Caesar, the dog whisperer. Mapping human-like identities over their alienness is just the normal human impulse to colonise, own, control. Mapping inhuman identities onto ethnic, religious and national Others is likewise a normal human impulse.
Kenwolman, can you make a succinct argument against eating dogs without recourse to mystical or spiritual "forces"? Can you then make cultural and political arguments as to why an international sporting and commercial event should cleave to the cultural biases of a great imperialist nation such as the U.S. rather than to the cultural biases of a lesser imperialist nation such as China?