While I may be wrong, didn’t South Korea declare dog meat to be illegal in 1988 because the Olympics were coming and international animal-rights groups complained?
That was part of it, IIRC. Another part is that dog meat has never been declared a consumable. Like many other laws here, though, there is a lot of conflict in legislation. In the last few days, the local press and the Stars & Stripes have run a few articles on the current debate regarding dogmeat. I’m leaving for an appointment in a few minutes; however, when I return, I’ll post links to the articles.
Mexicans also, and I second this question.
o/` Mrs. Mooney has a pie shop,
Does a business, but I notice something weird —
Lately all her neighbors’ cats have disappeared.
Have to hand it to her —
Wot I calls
Enterprise,
Popping pussies into pies. o/`
First, the Fan Death malarkey, and malarkey is what it is. Many people here are scared to death of catching, well, their death from having a fan running in the room with the windows and the door closed. They think there is something inherently dangerous about it that will poison the air or otherwise suck out their life force. I view it as an irrational reassignment of an actually dangerous practice from another season. Years ago, the ondol floor was heated in the winter by using coal in the fire pit. The pit’s chimney ran zigzag under the floor and then up the outside of the wall opposite the kitchen. As you can imagine, people were dying every day (different people, of course; not the same people dying day after day) from carbon monoxide poisoning. It was seriously dangerous to sleep in a room with the windows and doors closed then. Luckily, the ondol is now heated with hot water.
And now the promised links about the dogs:
Stars & Stripes article
Korea Times article
Exactly my reaction to that cite: a distinct lack of evidence for anyone in England ever, even reluctantly, making cats a normal part of their diet. Doing so unknowingly or under extreme duress, perhaps.
That jibes with Keith Thomas’s discussion of the matter back in his Man and the Natural World: there are isolated cases during the likes of the Civil War where people were driven to eat cats and dogs in England, but otherwise there have always been taboos about the matter. He quotes several of the rationales early modern writers used to justify the this. Which interestingly read strikingly similar to some of the posts above - they are carnivores, etc.
It’s an argument from a negative, but if there were any other historical exceptions to the generalisation that the English have never willingly ate cats, then Thomas is the person you’d expect to have noted them.
While I was working at a desert camp in Saudi Arabia in the early 80s, the Filipino cooks would feed leftover scraps to the wild desert dogs (salukis) to bulk them up, then serve them in a stew.
Of course with all the spices it was hard to identify any particular taste in the meat, but the concoction was delicious.