I was about to challenge this by saying that they were omnivores.
Well, quick googling, I’m wrong. Wow. Changed my belief system right there.
Guess I’ll have to go to the store for feeder animals…
As Harris (again) points out, there’s a difference in the kind of plants they eat. Cows eat grass. Pigs don’t. Pigs eat the same kind of plants that people eat – tubers, roots, vegetables, acorns (people can eat acorns). There’s a reason they use pigs to sniff out truffles. So even though pigs don’t primarily eat meat (although they will), they still compete with people for food. Cows (and sheep, and goats, and horses) don’t.
This, he contends, is one of the factors that has kept pigs proscribed in Middle Eastern cultures. The Jews and Muslims aren’t the only ones to find pigs abominable and untouchable – the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians did, also.
Thanks, Monty. I was going to bring that up, but hesitated to go round up the cites.
Yes, dog is not eaten in Korea out of hunger or need, nor is it raised humanely. It has precious little to do with diet at all. It’s the cultural equivalent of an illegal drug consumed for purported sexual reasons, but without any actual effect.
And preparing it involves the worst abuse imaginable, perpetrated on creatures that have been specially bred for thousands of year to trust humans and read and respond to human emotions.
Essentially there’s no comparison at all with farmed “meat animals” – or only a spurious one at best.
Not that I’m defending the farming of “meat animals,” but that’d be a hijack.
Sailboat
Avoiding the obvious pussy joke, can we get a cite here please?
Racist much? 
Nahh – clumsy typist.
Sounds like cats were eaten out of either hunger, or fraud (in much the same way as chalk was eaten, because millers used to add it to flour to increase profits).
Thats why a breed is called chow.
The breed’s name in English is actually Chow Chow. That link also gives the Chinese name for it. One suggestion is that the English term may come from the Chinese expression for Chinese Person.
Eaten dog, horse, monkey, gator, snake. Horse tastes more or less like beef, dog is vaguely porkish, monkey is also porkish, gator is sort of like turkey dark meat combined with frogleg, and snake is similar to chicken.
A lot of the posts here seem to assume that eating dog has always been a sort of anomaly. However, this isn’t really the case.
There is historical and archeological evidence that dog was commonly eaten eaten in the Yellow River and Yangtze areas since the stone age. It was only with the period of the sixteen kingdoms (c.300-400 CE) that a general dislike of dog meat spread throughout China, although it is still eaten in places.
I must disagree with Monty when he says that “The assertion that the ‘tradition’ goes back into the timeless realm of antiquity is just bunk.” Large quantities of dog remains from the stone age have been found in Korea, and paintings at the Koguryo tombs depict slaughtered dogs. While dog hasn’t been a staple of the South Korean diet for a long time, the practice itself is anything but recent.
In the southern Pacific, dogs were domesticated for their meat. In pre-columbian Mexico, dogs were also raised as a food source.
My point is that while eating dog isn’t commonly done today, this wasn’t always the case and there was a time when, in some parts of eastern Asia and the Pacific, dog was an important source of animal protein.
The biggest rational reason to not eat human is that human meat animals tend to fight back – sometimes with long jail sentences and negative publicity, especially if you go for the human veal. What frigging assholes!? I mean, the disease compatibility issue is probably the second biggest rational reason, but still I suspect that is has much more to do with people’s emotions towards that particular species of ape, rather than any argument based on science.
What kind of argument based on science do you want? Although various zoonoses vary among species and bad things tend to increase in concentration as you go up in the food chain, the reason we don’t eat dogs is the same as the reason we don’t eat dolphins, humans, chimps or cats. That reason is that there is no reason to, and there’s enough people who will fight back on the animals’ behalf (or in other words, not enough people who want to).
What, specifically? Since cattle and pigs carry tapeworms, and pigs carry trichinosis, and so on, what specific “problems” are you talking about that are not found in herbivores?
I think this is a problem specifically associated with the livers of Huskies, not dogs in general. Seal livers are also very high in vitamin A; if Huskies habitually are fed such livers that might have something to do with it.
I had dog in Nanning. It tastes like soft chewy beef. It wasn’t a big deal, and has everything to do with just how we ‘feel’ about the kind of animal. Dogs are everywhere in Asia and they are ignored by everyone, they don’t really bark and they never beg. They must look at the West and see the equivalent of us naming and walking pigs. Can you guys name a domesticated animal human beings haven’t eaten at one time? I’m not really sure cats are domesticated…they’d eat you if they were big enough.
On the subject of vitamin A in carnivores’ livers:
Vitamin A poisoning is deadly, and for reasons I won’t pretend to understand, tends to be concentrated heavily in the livers of carnivores. A supporting anecdote from Origins Revisted by the paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey:
Out in the Rift Valley, they’d found a hominid bone fossil that had an unusual marbled texture. Guessing correctly that it was a symptom of severe disease, they gave the fossil to experts at a university’s medical faculty and asked them what they thought. Without hesitation, they replied that is was a clear symptom of vitamin A poisoning.
They came up with that diagnosis without even having been told, or realising, that they were looking at a fossil, not a real bone - it was that well-preserved.
Anyway, the post-mortem’s conclusion was that the bone had belonged to a female of the species Homo erectus (I think) who had eaten the liver of a carnivore - probably a large cat. Apparently, that’s fatal in itself.
In reading the journals of Lewis and Clark, it is interesting to note that in the northwest, the Indian tribes ate dog all the time. When the expedition had trouble hunting enough deer, the Indians often gave them dogs. They reported that the men soon came to prefer it over venison.
On one occasion many many years ago, one of our sled dogs got badly injured and we had to put it down. Not wanting to waste anything we ate it. The taste was not bad, but it was really tough. The thing that amazes me, reading the above information about Vitamin A ,is that my partner, Gus Kawana, told me not to eat the liver. I never thought to ask why, but he must have known something (he was Eskimo, but in the Army).
OMG! I’ve been wanting to start a thread on just this subject, but I didn’t think anyone would have a clue what I was talking about!
Please please please explain to me the deal with the fans! Why are Koreans so scared of them and so adament about opening windows and doors when you use them. There are even safety timers on them!!! What are they scared of? What do the scientists think will happen? And what has caused this ‘thinking’!