Shanghai, China 1989 - was with a tourist group at a Chinese market (no one has a refrigerator over there) and we watched an old woman walk up to a pen of non-descript black puppies, point to one, and the man in charge casually broke its neck and put it in the woman’s bag.
Needless to say everyone was disgusted but I almost laughed because I seemed to have been the only one who figured out that there wasn’t a guy selling pets in the middle of what was otherwise a food market…the dogs are food too. I can’t say that I remember the make and model of the dog however… only that they were puppies, mostly black in color, and a short haired style that looked like a random mutt.
A friend-of-a-friend story (my friend the lawyer, speaking of his friend the consultant)
Male consultant is transferred to southeast Asia, I believe Malaysia. Salary is humongous, expenses minimal, so wife agrees to quit her job and accompany husband. Wife arrives, becomes socially isolated and very depressed. Couple takes trip to Hong Kong, wife sees puppies in a shop window (we know where this is headed, don’t we?). Immediately both think “great idea! Maybe a dog will help wife feel a little better.” Wife points to particularly adorable puppy…
Which shopkeeper kills, cleans, and packs in a paper bag.
Wife leaves on next plane for U.S.
I dunno, I’ve never felt any compunction about eating pet-animals. I wouldn’t eat my pet, but I wouldn’t have a problem with eating an animal of the same species.
If it’s slower, smaller or dumber than me, it’s lunch until proven otherwise.
This is probably OT, but I don’t think they mean the chihuahua when they say “Mexican hairless.” Here’s a link to Dog Fancy’s profile of the Xoloitzcuintli, a hairless dog raised by the Aztecs and “once thought to have medicinal value. They have been used as aids in treating arthritis, rheumatism and aches and pains.” It doesn’t say the dogs were ground up and eaten, but it kinda sounds that way, doesn’t it?
According to Marvin Harris’s Good to Eat: “Although the Aztecs did try to develop breeds of dogs that put on weight from eating cooked corn and beans, they would have been better off sticking to turkeys, which can at least eat uncooked plant food. In no way could either dogs or turkeys have furnished more than a token quantity of meat per capita even if they were eaten only by the Aztec elite.”
So where did the Aztecs get most of their meat? According to Harris, from the huge number of human sacrifices which they performed each year.
In GuangZhou don’t miss Qingping (Chingping) market? You’ll see all sorts of animals live and in different states of disection full of flies… including dogs, cats, monkeys, raccons… it’s like a zoo.
Many years ago there was a movie called Mondo Canie. The movie shows Asians pointing at dogs in cages and than the animals were boiled. This movie was in the mid-to late sixties I believe.
The “humans as a signifigant source of protien” theroy is not taken seriously by any Mesoamericanist that I know of; it was suggested by one man and almost immediatly dismissed by the academy; however, the popular press loved it. There was no need for additional meat protien in the Aztec diet–they recieved plently of vegetable protien through beans. As in much of China, meat was more of a garnish than a main dish. Dogs, fish and turkeys were the sources of this meat.
This is not to say that the Aztecs weren’t bloodthirsty cannibals–I am no apologist. I am just saying that there is no convienient dietary reason for it.
Meat dogs, hairless meat dogs
Which indians loved hairless meat dogs?
Mayans, Aztecs, down there in Peru
Toltecs, Olmecs, with human sacrificial stew
Loved meat dogs, hairless meat dogs
The dog Pre-Columbians loved to biiiite!
Manda JO- Well, actually I think Harris agrees that cannibalism is a very inefficient method of obtaining protein. However, as I read him, he maintains that most societies exhibit a desire for meat that is distinct from any immediate need for protein (and I don’t want to hijack this thread any further than we already have by debating that tangent). He does not dispute that the main source of protein in the Aztec diet came from plant matter. The point which he makes is that among the Aztecs (actually the Aztec elite)the flesh of sacrificial victims was the most common garnish. As he put it in examining “the Aztecs unique failure to repress cannibalism”: “As in other state societies, the Aztec elite had to strike a balance between the nutritional benefits provided by human flesh and the political and economic costs of destroying the wealth-producing potential of human labor power. The Aztecs chose to eat the human equivalent of the golden goose.”