Seeing that this thread has long ago derailed, I doubt anyone will notice or care about this, but just for the record:
Dogs have two characteristics that make them poor choices for food, one energetic and one ethical.
Firstly, dogs are, as noted above, carnivores. Although they can derive a significant proportion of their caloric needs from vegetable sources, in the absence of manufactured diets with processed vegetable protein and vitamin/mineral supplements they still require a significant amount of meat to maintain long-term health (I’m remembering about 20% of total caloric intake - I’ll try to look up some cites tomorrow), and unlike cattle/horses/sheep they can only eat and digest those vegetable foods that humans can also eat. [Pigs similarly can eat almost exclusively human-available foods, but they do well on a purely vegetarian diet and additionally can happily eat foods (such as acorns and dried cassava peels) that are nauseatingly unpalatable or even toxic for humans without extensive processing.] As such, it is energetically far more efficient to eat the meat that would be fed to the dog than to raise a dog for the purpose of eating it.
Secondly, although practically all domesticated animals down to and including chickens have been selected for easy socialization to humans, dogs have been selected to socialize to people more rapidly and with less encouragement than any other non-primate species studied to date. Dogs raised in laboratory conditions with minimal human contact will, when presented with a socialization opportunity, spend more time in the region of the experimenter, initiate contact more frequently, look at the experimenter’s face more often, and follow gaze cues and pointing more reliably, and will perform more difficult tasks to obtain socialization opportunities and show greater distress when the trial is ended, than any other non-primate species (domesticated or otherwise) raised in similar conditions. Dogs raised in near-isolation will, in fact, respond more strongly (on average) to an opportunity to socialize with a human than with another dog. Dogs are actually better at recognizing and interpreting human communicative gestures (such as pointing and gaze cues) than are other non-human primates (including chimpanzees) of a similar degree of socialization, in part because they (spontaneously) spend a greater proportion of the test time looking at and attending to the experimenters. Wolves display no such abilities, suggesting that these traits were introduced by artificial selection.
The practical upshot of this is that it is nigh-impossible to raise a bunch of dogs simply as livestock; anyone who has been to the even most foul of puppy mills knows how quickly dogs will respond to the most minimal human interaction. Pigs, horses, cows, etc. can become deeply attached to their human handlers, but for dogs it’s almost unavoidable. If you are raising a dog for food, or any other strictly utilitarian purpose, you may not love it but it almost certainly loves you. And this is a trait that we as a species have deliberately (if not necessarily consciously) introduced. It seems to me perverse, and even traitorous, to spend 10,000 years or so to create a species that is so deeply attached to us and then simply slaughter it and serve it for dinner.
Cats, meh; how do they taste with garlic sauce?
JRB
But seriously, no, I haven’t. I was born and raised in the city, and have not spent a lot of time out of it, 'cept on the occasional holidays. I’ll admit I have had zero experience with the preparation of the food that has ended up on my plate. And, I have no inclination to get any blood on my hands, unless it is absolutely necessary. If that is a character defect, so be it.