Letters to the Editor
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No difference
If you saw that happen to a chicken or lamb or goat, it would have been a little gross, but you'd have eaten it. There's no difference between raising a dog for food and raising a chicken for food. That's just a raw reality. It even sounds like the dog had a good time and was treated well. What I object to are tightly caged animals who suffer during their short lives before they die, cruel and inefficient slaughter methods, poor husbandry, poaching and exploitation of endangered species.
In this country, horsemeat is banned from the table. They've had to loosen it a big for zoos, because the closest thing to zebra meat is horsemeat and lions need to eat something. Horses still continue to be raced to death and premarin horses continue to be used in Canada for medicine sold here in the US. But, sentimentality prevents the meat from being used to feed people.
It makes no sense. Why is one animal more deserving of our love than another? Why not love all of them?
And what's with the Chinese being so provincial? If they want to host the world at their table, they'd better learn what we're willing to eat.
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this article is mostly wrong
First of all, did you ever see a cat being served at a restaurant in China? I have lived here in China for 6 years and never saw that. I hear in some places in Canton Province people eat cats. But I never saw this.
Dog meat in China is considered a niche delicacy. It is normally only eaten in the Winter time. Most people I have talked with do not eat it at all, or have eaten dog meat once every few years. It is, at most, a once a year meal for most people here, if that.
FYI, the majority of chicken Chinese people eat is free-range. The majority of beef Chinese people eat comes from working-animals...not herded cows. Since Chinese people eat organ-meats, as well as bone and cartilage, they value more of the animal that they kill. Unfortunatly, a lot of the lamb and pork is "free-range" too, which means that the animals eat a lot of crap (literally) and garbage.
Personally, the China animal cruelty story should be about city-people who keep big dogs as pets, locked up in their small appartments.
The majority of city-dwellers in China have enough common sense to differentiate a food animal and a pet animal. They are also very aware that Westerners do not eat dogs. The majority of Chinese people themselves do not eat dogs at all. Therefore, I think the the coach of the ski team was being cruel...to you. If I was you, I would have punched him out..right then and there.
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Baffled
I have a really hard time with the notion that a nation of 300,000 should be regulating (or seriously discussing as a foreign policy goal) the diet of a nation of 1 billion.
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correction
300,000,000 people in 'merca, not 300,000.
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Citizen McCain
You would never shower dogs and cats with napalm.
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And then there are the bear farms,
Where they farm caged moon bears for bile. So some humans can live long and prosper:
http://www.animalsasia.org/
There's not too much difference between that and their use of the dogs. Other than - the bears are allowed to live until they become unproductive in their cages.
Despite great, sensitive philosophical traditions passed down over thousands of years, one may find that the Chinese civilization as a whole was never really overly concerned about their use of the environment.
To read more about that, this poetic survey of 5,000 years of Chinese environmental history is a good place to start:
The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China by: Mark Elvin
And then, contrast that sad state with the depth of human and worldly knowledge covered in say Bill Porter's book: 'Road to Heaven: Encounters With Chinese Hermits' and the more recent film on the same topic:
Amongst White Clouds http://www.amongstclouds.com
So knowing all that, I guess if we are going to be doing more business with them, at least we should come prepared to sit at their tables. And acknowledge their help assisting the current administration in subsidizing our fake wars by floating us the funds.
Or possibly not, as the case may be:
http://www.boycottmadeinchina.org/
But we would have to give up our cute cheap toys in the process.
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Domesticated animals
It makes a difference in thus discussion that domestic animals are killed in these ways. Forever, they have been bred to befriend and develop comfortable relationships with humans. They do suffer horrific pain in many cases before actually dying and anyone who could do that, for a "special meal" or any other cultural habit is missing a compassion gene or two. Skinning a live animal struggling while hanging from it's haunches to save time, or because it's cheapest? I really do hope they come back in the next life as a mink in a cage or maybe as a pit bull in a basement.
On a related topic, I noticed that "shark fin soup" is still sold in some restaurants. To cut off the fin and let the shark die like that always seemed cruel and unusual. I thought Clinton had passed a bill, but there it was on the menu. There are so many things people do that are barbaric and unnecessary in our "advanced" society and probably not enough people who feel affected by any of it.
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Berthold Brecht said it better than I could...
First sort out your basic food position; then start your preaching.
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Mankind's disgrace
If the deliberate torture or destruction of a sentient, thinking, and feeling being demands only passing moral consideration, what construct protects humans from their fellow man?
What number of beings should one human be allowed to sacrifice for their pleasure before the taking is too great? 1? 1,000?
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I'm really intrigued by the suggestion that the whole premise of the article is wrong
i don't know in this particular case, but I do know that Americans often assume that people in developing countries know far less about the developed worlds culture than they actually do, especially people in countries like China that are actually fairly developed, and it is true that a lot of the cultural conflicts that we think of as being between modernity and backwardness are taking place more intensely and matter more to the people involved when they occur WITHIN societies than when they occur between them.