So it seems that Vietnam is cracking down on dog meat, for various ethical reasons, And for the life of me, I cannot see any ethical difference between eating a cow, a sheep or a dog, provided all are kept and slaughtered in humane conditions, Any input?
The ethical dilemma with the dog meat is the incredible cruelty involved in dispatching the animal. The mythos surrounding its consumption in this part of the world is that the more the poor critter suffered on its way to your plate, the better it is for your “stamina” (keeping your penis erect). The various excuses trotted out for why it’s not bad or is no different than consumption of other meats are just cover, lies.
I’m not sure that that’s true of everywhere that eats dog meat.
For sure there are places that are disgustingly cruel to dogs, and that sometimes use stolen pets. I don’t think they’ll be much dispute about these being wrong.
But speaking more abstractly about eating dog meat, I would agree with the OP that there is no ethical difference, but with the caveat that dogs are 1) predators that 2) have been bred by us to, for example, crave human companionship*. This is just to say that a hypothetical environment that is not cruel to livestock, may nonetheless be cruel to keep dogs in.
FTR I’m vegan, because I actually consider all modern farming inhumane. But back in my meat-eating days, I did eat lots of different kinds of meat; I didn’t see an ethical distinction between “meats you find in a Western supermarket fridge” and meats that you don’t.
* Piglets seem pretty fond of humans too, that’s part of what pushed me into being vegan, but I don’t know about adult pigs.
I found the book Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat an interesting discussion of our different attitudes towards different animals.
The fact that there’s really not much ethical difference between eating traditional ‘prey’ animals such as cow & lamb and traditional ‘predator-pet’ animals such as dog & cat has been covered. It really comes down to a question of local culture. Horse meat is pretty commonly served in Europe, but here in the US, we’ve had a more ‘romantic’ relationship with horses over the years that makes Americans think of eating horse meat as disgusting and wrong.
When I went to the zoo as a kid, the farm animal exhibit had an educational plaque that talked about how early man typically made food out of prey animals (cow & lamb) and pets out of predators (dog & cat). I don’t even know how accurate the anthropology of that was, and I don’t believe it’s there any more, but as a kid it made me wonder-- did we eat prey animals and make pets of predators because we felt a kinship with the predator animals, being predators ourselves? Do vegetarian animals ‘taste better’ than meat eaters?
Of course there are plenty of exceptions to that, even within the West: we eat pork, despite the fact that pigs are omnivores. We eat chicken though they are also omnivores. As I mentioned we don’t eat horse here in the US, though they are vegetarian prey animals. Again, it seems to come down to our affinity for the animal in each culture. In the West we love our pet dogs and cats. In the US horses are admired as beautiful animals and respected for their utility, so they get a ‘pass’ to not have to endure the postmortem indignity of being eaten.
I believe the rate of pet ownership in Vietnam has been increasing over the years. That probably has something to do with it.
I think that, over time, people have eaten what is available to them. We have an absolutely huge amount of farmland, so we can grown almost an unlimited amount of vegetables. Coastal communities, however, traditionally depended heavily on fish, etc. Some countries don’t have much available farmland, so eating animals is the logical result. Good or bad, this one yes and that one no, etc, really didn’t come into play.
I have heard of starving urban residents eating dogs, cats, rats, horses, mules, anything else they could get their hands on during various wars. Not to mention cannibalism and other horror stories.
One legend goes that after the Siege of Leningrad was broken four trainloads of cats had to be sent in as rats were eating all the food that was once again being delivered to the city; (apparently all the cats from before had been eaten?)
Cultural Materialist anthropologist Marvin Harris had much to say about why different cultural groups eat certain things and abhor others, particularly in his book **Good to Eat ** (also published as The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig) A large part of it boils down to a sort of real world economics. We don’t eat cats and dogs primarily because they’re carnivores – we’d have to feed them meat, and it’s easier and more efficient to just eat that meat ourselves. Cows, Sheep, Goats, etc. eat grass, which we can’t digest, so we can efficiently eat them. Pigs are an intermediary case – we eat a lot of the same foods, but pigs do eat things we can’t or won’t. Horses eat grass and grains, but they got as pass because they were extremely useful and, indeed, necessary as not only beasts of b urden, but as war animals. Our ancestors are horse, but there was a long period in Europe when they did not, because they were too necessary for war.
This is only a sketch, and doesn’t o into the details about why certain animals are good to eat in some places and times and not in others (like the cow and the pig in his other title), and you really need to read his book to get the full argument. He devotes entire chapters each to horses, cows, pigs, and insects.
There really isn’t any distinction. It mainly boils down psychologically to the ‘cute’ or appealing factor.
Some people claim it’s about intelligence, yet they’re okay with people eating octopus, which is one of the smartest animals.
It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s true; there was indisputably cannibalism during the siege, the NKVD arrested 2,105 for cannibalism by December 1942.
Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, refutes the idea that predators don’t taste good by making note that lion actually tastes pretty good. Prey animals tend to be more plentiful than predators, which might explain why we’d have a greater propensity for eating them. And since many of them have a herd instinct they’re likely a bit easier to domesticate than lions or bears.
It should be noted that some prey animals are very, very dangerous as many visitors to Yellowstone find out each year. You can Google some pretty terrifying videos of tourist running afoul of bison. Here’s a helpful parenting tip: Maybe don’t let your ten year old girl get so close to a wild animal weighing in excess of a ton.
That really changes the evolutionary tree.
Are you sure that Diamond wasn’t just lion? 
Also, as @CalMeacham pointed out upthread, there’s no point in domesticating and raising carnivores for food since we might as well just eat the meat we’d have to feed them.
Then there is the related issue of eating insects…
The example I liked from the book I mentioned up thread was rats and mice. Generally they are thought of as vermin, to be exterminated. But some are bred for scientific experiments, are quite expensive, and are treated well (well, besides the experiment part.) But if a lab mouse falls on the floor of the lab, it becomes vermin (due to potential contamination).
What is “NKVD” in this context?
“Narodný Komissariat Vnutrennih Del”. People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. It was basically the national police force of the Soviet Union.
What @Dorjan said, it was the direct predecessor of the KGB.
It’s in the Harris books I mentioned, as well. Basically the problem with insects is that they’re small and you have to work really hard to gather enough of them to eat. Unles you have a special situation, like a flock of locusts ate all your grain. Then you have no grain, but a LOT of locusts, and each of them is pretty large, and they’re easy to catch, once they;ve gorged on grain. You don;'t have any grain to eat, so you may as well eat the locusts.
It’s not like you’re eating mostly liquid goop – locust bodies have a lot of clean muscle tissue (to power those wings), so there’s plenty of solid muscle to eat. And you can smoke it to prreserve it for later.
I highly recommend this book. Hilarious, and filled with bug recipes:
If you’re eating a bunch of locusts who just gorged on your grain, then you sort of do have grain to eat. They’re a bunch of little locust-grain turduckens.