Parts of China, parts of Korea, and parts of the Phillipines consider eating dogs cool. Very small part of human population, which will eat most mammals they can get their hands on. Not sure what the relevance of whether they are working animals or pests has to do with anything . . . people consider rabbit and deer pests and still eat them . . . pigs can be considered pests and most people eat them . . . horses are working animals and eaten more often than dogs.
Basically, the vast majority of the Christian world, the Muslim and Jewish and Hindu worlds all consider dog meat taboo. Dogs are human companions in almost every society and have been for a long time. Most people would considering killing them in an inhumane manner not cool.
I mean, even in the farmland areas of this country, if a Farmer Jack needed to reduce a deer population and was like, “let me go ahead and gouge out their eyes first, cause hey, why not,” and told Farmer Jim about it, Farmer Jim would probably quietly not invite Jack to the next church picnic.
I’m certainly not claiming that a majority of the human population eats dog meat on a regular basis, but certainly many people from all around the world do (and many more have, before modern Western attitudes towards dogs became more widespread). Dog meat and dog lard is still used in small areas of many European countries despite the Western taboo and laws (most of which only went into effect in the 1980s!) against the practice. All I’m saying is that there’s nothing instinctive about dog being consider ‘man’s best friend’ and afforded special treatment, much less the lengths we go to in our country where most pet dogs are nearly as pampered as human children.
As for your second point; let’s stick to drowning as the method of death. How differently do you think your average (rat-phobic, kitty-worshipping) American would feel about a farmer drowning rats, or unwanted barn cats? I can only imagine how people I know would foam at the mouth with rage or erupt into grief if they were exposed to the latter. However nost people feel killing ‘filthy’ rats of any age by any method is a necessity and not ‘cruel’, wheras someone killing ‘baby’ kittens if is a moral abomination. In other cultures, there might be hardly any difference in the public opinion of the morality of drowning rats or cats.
Well, it’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it? The average monthly salary in Bosnia is $521 per month. And this looked to be like some girl out in the countryside, where I would assume the salaries are lower.
Yep. My mother (Polish-born) swears by dog lard as being a curative for respiratory ailments. She claims that she’s even fed me dog lard (in tea) when I was a kid when I was sick with bronchitis. And, here’s an article I found about dog lard sales in Poland from last year.
I didn’t see your post- you’re right, I can’t find any semi-reliable sources claiming dog eating is practiced in South America these days. However before colonization there were entire breeds of dogs raised solely for human consumption there.
Cat meat is socially acceptable in certain areas of Peru, I got confused.
Small parts of the world have historically considered marriage between siblings acceptable. Today, decent-sized chunks of the world consider first cousin marriage acceptable. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t generally a human taboo against incest.
Your discussion of my second point has nothing to do with my second point, which is about the difference between euthenasia and inhumane killing. There is a difference between killing animals humanely and inhumanely. There would be a lot less fuss if she was just shooting them in the head, or quickly drowning them. The fact that she was throwing them in a river is what has most people up in arms. We would feel the same if she shot them in the legs and then let them bleed to death. Hence, the comparison to Farmer Jack killing his pest-deer by shooting them in the head vs. first gouging their eyes out. Killing animals because they are somehow endangering your health or livelihood is a necessary evil. Doing it gleefully can be considered a sociopathic trait.
You really think people would have felt better about this video if it showed her putting the mewling puppies one-by-one in a bucket of water and holding their heads under until they died?
You really think so? I think the immediacy and gruesomeness of shooting them in the head would make people more up in arms about it than the casual tossing of puppies in the river.
Okay, maybe I’m extrapolating. I would have felt better if that’s how she did it. This way seems really unfair to the puppies, because they might not die immediately and be injured and alive for a bit, or maybe some of them are old enough to swim and would be injured and alive for a while.
The sense of glee, combined with the implicit cruelty of hurling puppies into a river, that I got from her actions is what disturbed me the most.
Maybe, if the actual deaths of the puppies is what bothered people. While I love dogs and think it is sad if you have to kill puppies, I can understand why it might be necessary. But again, the implicit cruelty of chucking them in a river is what gets me.
Everyone was sad with Timmy (or whatever his name was) when he had to kill Ol’ Yeller. If he had picked a less humane method than shooting, I think more ppl would have been upset.
I see your logic, of course, and I totally agree that a shot to the head is the more humane method. But I would guess for most people (and maybe I’m wrong), the visceral reaction to seeing a puppy’s brains splattered against the ground would be more extreme than watching a girl throw a puppy into the river and then it being carried downstream.
ETA: And I don’t necessarily read “glee” on this girl’s face. It seems kind of forced and put-on to me, but that’s just me. It’s possible that she is actually getting a kick from doing this, but I don’t see the video as evidence of it.
Missed the edit: ETA: And I don’t necessarily read “glee” on this girl’s face. It seems kind of forced and put-on to me, but that’s just me. It’s possible that she is actually getting a kick from doing this, but I don’t see the video as evidence of it. I can’t read what’s going on in her mind. I remember being as a kid, visiting my cousins on the farm in Poland, and having to skin a rabbit. I wasn’t particularly happy about the task, but when we got down to it, I compensated for the gruesomeness of the job by removing myself from it with a bit of black humor. We kind of made a silly puppet out of the skin and, at the very end, we ended up popping out the rabbit’s eyeballs (yes, it was well dead at this point) and having an “eyeball fight” (as with snowballs) in order to inject a little levity into what was, for me, quite a novel and gruesome experience, being a born-and-bred city boy.
Yeah, I agree that the “glee” was maybe a reading a bit much into the act. But why would she choose this less humane method than drowning them directly? Less pain for her? I that case, why didn’t she set them gently in the river? They would probably drown anyways.
I think the most charitable interpretation I can come up with is that a girl is tasked with the unpleasant duty of killing puppies. She decides, in a “black humor” moment, to make a game out of it and chuck them in the river. But why would she tape it?
Maybe it wasn’t her idea to tape it. Maybe her friend thought it was a good idea. I don’t know. Or maybe, she’s simply a 12-year-old with no perspective. I’m willing to give her the benefit of a doubt on this one–at least a little more than the US Marines who thought it was a good idea to tape themselves throwing puppies off a cliff. Now the outrage against them I could see justified. Not so much this girl.
She’s 12, she has little understanding of the consequences of her actions, she might be stupid, she could lack empathy for animals (which doesn’t make her a sadist or sociopath), she could be a mean person, she might have been pressured into the whole thing by the person holding the camera who no one seems to know anything about, she’s 12, she could be developmentally disabled or delayed, either way she’s 12 and 12-year-olds very often behave brutishly which doesn’t necessarily reflect the adults they will become, and certainly don’t always make the best choices when it comes to their media image.
So if any of you guys found a neighbor’s 12 year old kid hurling puppies or bunnies into a river, you’d just be like, “Boys will be boys!”
Or would you go out of your way to avoid that kid from then on?
I’d stop what was going on, that’s for sure. I like puppies and bunnies, it would be tough for me to see someone doing that right in front of me, and why allow it to when I could take them down the block to my local excellent and mostly empty animal shelter where they have a good chance at becoming someone’s pet?
But I’ve seen that sort of thing happen enough times in my life to realize that enjoying or having no regrets over killing animals, and not doing in the quickest way possible doesn’t make someone evil or damaged, especially when that person is a child who might only have engaged in this sort of behavior in unusual circumstances, or might just have been raised very differently than you or I. I used to be the tomboy that punched the neighbor boys when I caught them shooting birds with their BB guns. Those boys all grew up to be decent people, and I rightfully was punished for lashing out at people just because I had a soft heart and didn’t grow up in a family where I had exposure to animal death.