As I’ve mentioned, I take requests when possible. It is an instance of odd serendipity that the two requests I’ve received have both concerned dogs: first, how much we love them and second, now, what it’s like eating them. Yumwatch, for reasons both culinary and ethical, has asked that I discuss what it was like consuming my favorite animal while in China.
Because I lack the needed vocabulary to describe food well -an effect of living in state of almost total gastronomic deprivation- I’ll be brief on the question of taste: dog was delicious, very tender and very rich in flavor; it did not taste like chicken, or indeed like any other meat. It seemed quite fatty, but in a pleasant way, and even a vegetarian with us made an exception and enjoyed it.
On the ethical question, I won’t retreat to spiritual vagaries about “grokking the essence” of a creature I’d as soon have spooned in my bed, but I will say that having worked in a veterinary hospital (and having lost family pets) I know that dogs don’t fear death. Living in the eternal present, without language or super-perceptual consciousness, even fear and suffering in animals are almost magically different.
But rare are those not affected by images like this or arguments like those below it, and I tend to be heartbroken by the mortality of even amphibians. Indeed, I don’t even kill cockroaches. What accounts for my willingness to eat dog is not disregard for dogs’ moral value or capacity for suffering but a simple sense of my statistical irrelevance: as my eating cows, which have personalities and nervous systems, after all, and chickens, and pigs, makes no real difference to the quantities killed, so too was my consumption of dog effectively unrelated to the killing of the dog, which was already accomplished.
And about dead meat I am not sentimental: nothing resides in the body after death of an animal (or a man, I would note outside these parentheses if I weren’t worried about seeming demented), and so the consumption of this inert material has little emotional impact on me. The reverence for flesh disconnected from life that some feel seems odd to me.
In any event, I freely admit that all this violates the chief principle of my morality: that effects and praxis have no place in real moral thought. I have no excuse for that except that, on occasion, I have been tempted against morality by the desire for experience. But I am certain that the distinction between, say, beef and dog-meat is so arbitrary as to be specious: animals feel, and merely anthropomorphizing the cow you eat less than you do your dog is not reason to consider one worth killing and eating and the other sacred.
In any event, a story from Kundera: Salvador Dali and his wife were to leave for a long trip and worried what to do with their beloved pet rabbits. One night, as he finished a delicious meal, she warmly told him that she’d killed them, cooked them, and he’d eaten them, feeling that it was only in this way that they could truly bring them along.
Salvador found this wanting: he ran to the bathroom and forced himself to vomit. What we want to protect, and how we think we can protect it, are matters of the most personal and private sort.
