Horses do a lot of work for us. It seems pretty shitty to eat them afterwards.
Much of what we do is irrational. We do it because that’s how we like doing things.
You have no idea how much the comment that they eat Pork to avoid “greasy” beef amuses me.
On the whys and wherefores of what’s good to eat and what isn’t, I recommend (as I frequently do here) anthropologist Marvin Harris’ book Good to Eat (duh.), also called The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig (Harruis claimed he changed the title because too many people thought Good to Eat sounded like a cook book.)
A few brief snippets from the book (but note that this is not the whole case, which has much more to buttress it than these "index card’ arguments.)
People don;t generally raise dogs and cats as food, because hey eat meat. If you have the meat already, you can eat that, and you don’t need the dog or cat (which isn’t going to be 100% efficient, anyway). Eating cows, goats, sheep, and other grass-eaters, on the other hand, doesn’t have that difficulty. People who do eat dog don’t eat it as a staple – it’s a luxury. And such people usually don’yt have a lot of large domesticated ruminants to eat. Dog was big in Polynesia and North America, none of which have cows, goats, and the like; Polynesians have non-domesticated pig. The Chinese and Koreans have other animals to eat, but dog isn’t exactly a staple.
I don’t know of any group that eats cat.
Cats are farmed? Perhaps you’ve taken too literally the phrase “herding cats”?
I’m a vegan, so I don’t eat any animals (not since I converted, anyway). Even before I converted, I was keenly aware of the arbitrariness of our choice of which animals to eat. I even had pet birds at one point and still ate chicken, and I’d raised chickens, so I’d seen live ones up close on a daily basis in my youth.
Hypocritical, you say? You bet. I eventually changed my whole diet, in part because of the hypocrisy.
I would note that dogs and cats contribute much more to human wellbeing alive than they would as dinner entrees…in the past, dogs were essential work animals, and cats possibly even more critical, protecting the stored grain that has been the source of mankind’s expansion.
It is as companions that these animals best help modern mankind. Never mind SETI, you can make contact with a nonhuman species every day in your living room.
But practicality aside, I think that the extraordinary concern for ( which you term “sacredness”) certain companion animals is a relatively recent development, but part of a long-term trend. As a vegan, I tend to regard it as indeed illogical to factory-farm chickens in terrible conditions, but buy music CDs for my pampered parrots. I hope it’s illogical to more and more people as we think about it.
I look forward to gradually adding more and more species to our list of “like us: do not hurt them” animals, in much the same way that civilization has added more and more humans to the list of “in groups” we no longer feel free to kill arbitrarily.
It’s a long historical process, though. Sigh.
Sailboat
This is America, where men are men, girls are girls and the cats and dogs are sacred.
I ate some bear last week. Fascinating stuff; very strong. Definitely not an herbivore. I couldn’t eat very much, but I’d certainly eat it again.
I also came here to recommend Marvin Harris. Jali, Don’t ignore this. Harris is essential to understanding cultural eating practices; otherwise, you’ll be burdened with several half-truths and wild-ass-guesses.
For example, it’s not true that no one eats an animal they treat as companions. Harris talks about Polynesians who raise their pigs as members of the household, even nursing them alongside their children. But, when it comes to feast time, the pigs are still eaten.
In general, food choices have to do with the environmental conditions in the places where the traditions originated. Jews and Muslims today avoid eating pork because it’s a religious taboo. But that taboo originated in a fact that the deforestation of the Middle East made raising pigs for food an enivornmental burden. The same is true of cows in India, but in a slightly different way; they became too valuable as draft animals and sources of dairy to be eaten.
Animals that are not worth the energy to catch/raise/eat in calorical terms often become shunned, like insects or other non-mammals in places where large domesticated mammals and fowl are available.
Carnivores such as cats and dogs are usually not raised for food because they consume way too much in calories than they provide in meat.
Perhaps because this symbiosis developed in the earliest stages of human civilization, dogs and cats were conceived to be in the “not food” category, at least in Western cultures. Of course this may not account for the cultures which do eat dogs and/or cats.
Whenever I hear a dog barking outside my window I can’t help but marvel at the fact that dogs have been barking outside windows since windows have existed–along with walls, doors, and built houses.
Homer: Lisa honey, are you saying you’re never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: Dad! Those all come from the same animal!
Homer: [Chuckles] Yeah, right Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.
Well, the truth about cats and dogs is… 97 minutes long.
I am confident that cats and dogs will soon have voting rights: *The Domesticated Animal Suffrage Act. *
Once cats and dogs get the vote, it won’t take long for the other animals to catch on.
Indeed. Lewis & Clark ate a good number of dogs on their expedition.
Well we’ve got at least 1 high profile quarterback in jail for dog-fighting. Dog fighting is without doubt a cruel activity and should not be called a “sport”. I agree with Vick being where he is. But on the other hand we hand out licences to hunt deer, moose, elk, turkey, wildfowl, squirrels and pretty much every other living thing in the wild. Are they killed humanely? Is the hunter punished if he only wounds the animal and then is unable to locate it and put it out of its misery?
From a purely logical standpoint its totally hypocritical…we have elevated dogs and cats above the level of a wild animal and give them legal rights. Well in that case they should be paying taxes too!
It’s not a good analogy. Dog fighting isn’t dog hunting. We don’t force deer or turkeys to fight to the death. In fact, cock fighting has been banned and prosecuted as severely as dog fighting, and it’s not because we love chickens the way we love dogs.
I think the OP is confused because another poster fell afoul of the rules by asking about ways to break the law via cruelty to animals. These laws encompass not only pets of all kinds, but livestock as well. Some laws may also include wildlife as well. Dogs and cats do seem to be at, or near the top of the preferred pet list in the USA. The United States isn’t the only country for which this is true though. And other countries have even stricter laws with regards to what is considered cruelty to animals. Example: In the UK you cannot declaw a cat at all.
I always thought there was some logic in not eating dogs or cats (or horses) simply because they were more useful to us in other ways than they would be as sources of food. Dogs help us to hunt other food and protect us while we’re getting it, cats–other than my worthless citified cat–keep rodents out of our grains, and horses are very useful in cultivating land on which we grow food, hauling food we have grown or hunted, and taking us to places where we can trade for other food. It makes sense not to eat them because they provide more food value over their lifetimes than their scrawny, overworked bodies contain.
This bird lover does. For that matter, my birds like chicken and turkey, too.
But then, a parrot eating chicken isn’t any different than humans eating cow - it’s not cannibalism, the two species are quite separated.
This is also part of Harris’ Cultural Materialism explanation. But, even if dogs weren’t useful, we still wouldn’t go eating them because they’re inefficient. They’re tough to hunt. and if you tried to game-farm them, you’d end up spending too much meat (that you could eat yourself, directly) to feed them. We don’t raise lions on farms for food, no matter how “regal” it might be, because it’s just not worth the effort, and you could get a lot more meat yourself by eating what you’d feed them.
As Cal says, it’s not the entire story. Old horses that are no longer fit for work are perfectly edible, but it’s still not accepted to send a retired horse to the slaughterhouse (in America anyway).
IIRC, there used to be at least one and maybe two Seattle butcher shops that specialized in horse meat.