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Wok the DogWhat's wrong with eating man's best friend?

By William SaletanPosted Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2002, at 6:56 PM ET

Nine months ago, Frame Game grossed out its readers by tackling a mounting controversy in newspapers and state legislatures: the ethics of having sex with dogs. In that column, Frame Game asked "why, if it's wrong to rape animals, it's OK to kill them." Carnivores who ignored this question will now have to confront it. The biggest team sporting event on earth, soccer's World Cup, is coming to South Korea, where hot dogs and doggy bags are all too literal. Those of us who don't take our poodles with noodles will have to think about why, or whether, it's wrong to eat man's best friend.

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Dogs ready for marketIn case you've been distracted by the war or the recession, here's where the dog fight stands. Dogs are eaten in parts of East and Southeast Asia. The South Korean dog meat industry reportedly involves about 1 million dogs, 6,000 restaurants, and 10 percent of the population. French actress-turned-activist Brigitte Bardot, backed by thousands of rabid European and American letter writers, has enlisted FIFA, the world soccer federation, to pressure South Korea to shut down the industry. South Korean lawmakers, angered by this pressure, are pushing to legalize the industry next month. The industry, armed with supportive research by a scholar known as "Dr. Dogmeat," plans to set up dog-meat stands near World Cup stadiums and advertise recipes on English-language Web sites.

On Jan. 14, animal rights activists muzzled the industry's PR campaign kickoff. On Jan. 19, Korean hackers plan to attack the Web sites of French and American media companies that have disparaged canine Seoul food. The controversy has even invaded New York, where lawmakers are considering whether to ban dog meat (which is legal in 44 states) amid reports that it's being sold there. Editorials have expressed disgust at the practice, and Korean-Americans are assuring the public that they, too, find it barbaric. Everybody wants to show that he's civilized by condemning the eating of dogs. There's only one problem: Nobody can explain why it's wrong. In fact, on closer examination, the arguments against dog-eating turn out to be creepier than dog-eating itself.

Let's start with the clearest complaint: the needlessly cruel methods—beating, strangling, boiling—by which many dogs are killed in Korea. To Frame Game, this is a no-brainer. These methods have to be stopped. At a minimum, they should be replaced with electrocution, which is far more humane. That's why South Korean lawmakers are proposing to legalize, license, and regulate the industry. But guess who's trying to stop them? The same attack-dog activists who complain about the cruelty of the old methods.

Grilled dog meatSouth Korea's Livestock Processing Act doesn't officially apply to dogs. The obvious solution is to classify dogs as livestock. But in 1999, legislators who tried to do that were thwarted by critics who warned that legalization would hurt the country's image. Now anti-dog-meat activists in Korea, Britain, Australia, and elsewhere are trying to block legalization again, arguing that "there is no recognized humane method of killing" dogs. As a spokesman for the Korea Animal Protection Society put it, "South Korean officials misunderstand the situation. They think it would be okay as long as dogs are not killed in a cruel manner." Given a choice between ending the cruelty and waging their all-out war till the last dog is hung, the activists choose the latter. FIFA, too, opposes legalization—at least until after the World Cup—and calls for a total end to dog-meat consumption.

To justify keeping the industry underground, unsafe, and inhumane, activists ought to have a pretty good reason why dog-eating—as opposed to the eating of other animals, which they tolerate—is too horrible to legalize. But what is that reason? Since dogs aren't smarter or more gentle than pigs, for example, anti-dog-meat activists argue that dogs are special because they're "pets" and "companion" animals. FIFA President Sepp Blatter calls them the "best friend of humankind." Dogs are "friends, not animals," Bardot told a Korean radio interviewer. "Cows are grown to be eaten, dogs are not. I accept that many people eat beef, but a cultured country does not allow its people to eat dogs."

Strip out Bardot's silly arrogance and her Korean colleagues' sentimentality, and their philosophy boils down to this: The value of an animal depends on how you treat it. If you befriend it, it's a friend. If you raise it for food, it's food. This relativism is more dangerous than the absolutism of vegetarians or even of thoughtful carnivores. You can abstain from meat because you believe that the mental capacity of animals is too close to that of humans. You can eat meat because you believe that it isn't. Either way, you're using a fixed standard. But if you refuse to eat only the meat of "companion" animals—chewing bacon, for example, while telling Koreans that they can't stew Dalmatians—you're saying that the morality of killing depends on habit or even whim.

The joke is on you because in Korea, until recently, dogs haven't been pets. Therefore, by the "companion" standard, it's OK to eat them. In fact, the "companion" standard is exactly what South Korean newspapers and government officials are using to justify an emerging system of dog Nazism. In the city, Koreans raise "pet dogs." In the country, they raise "meat dogs," also known as "junk dogs" and "lower-grade" dogs. But you don't become a "lower-grade" dog by flunking an IQ test. You're just born in the wrong place. Then you're slaughtered and fed to a man who thinks he's humane because he pampers a Golden Retriever that has half your brains. And Bardot, who says that cows can be butchered because they're "grown to be eaten," can't fault this arrangement.

If dog-eating isn't intrinsically wrong, why should South Koreans give it up? Because, Bardot told her radio interviewer, "Eating dog meat seriously hurts the image of your country." FIFA President Blatter likewise told South Korea that the practice was bad for its "international image." He urged the country "to show the world that it is sensitive to vociferous worldwide public opinion." But absent an underlying moral argument, appeals to "image" and "sensitivity" are as likely to disguise snobbery or evil as to promote good.

There's more than a whiff of cultural supremacy, if not racism, in French attacks on Korean dog-eating. When Bardot's radio interviewer told her that some Western visitors eat dog meat in Korea, she replied: "French people, German people, and Americans never eat dogs. If they did, it is most likely that South Koreans served them dog meat, saying it was either pork or beef." The French soccer team supports Bardot's campaign. A French state TV channel recently ridiculed Korean dog-eating in a piece full of distortions. Never mind that some Frenchmen eat horse meat or snails or that, according to a Seoul waitress, more than one staffer from the French Embassy has sated his canine tooth at her restaurant. Norwegians didn't stop eating reindeer during the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics. American restaurants didn't stop serving bull testicles during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. No one forced Spain to outlaw cat stew during the 1982 World Cup, and no one is hounding Japan, the co-host of this year's World Cup, to shut down its sushi bars.

Fourteen years ago, when Seoul hosted the Summer Olympics, the dog-meat critics had their day. The South Korean government threw them a bone, banning dog meat under a law prohibiting "foods deemed unsightly." That's the law FIFA now wants South Korea to invoke to sweep away dog-meat restaurants during the World Cup. But unsightliness, by definition, is in the eye of the beholder, and beholders are motivated by prejudice as often as by justice. The last time organizers of a global sporting event removed an "unsightly" presence from their city, that presence was the homeless people of Atlanta. If FIFA and other carnivorous arbiters of civilization want to tell Koreans what to eat, they'll have to come up with a better reason than that.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here.

Photographs of women at a South Korean dog market by Yun Suk-Bong/Reuters; vendor selling grilled dog meat in Vietnam by Rathavary Duong/Reuters.

COMMENTS

Notes From The Fray Editor

We weren't looking forward to this one (if you want to know why, check out the Fray Notes here, and here, and here.) We fully expected horror, outrage, and messages saying "I hope you choke on your dogmeat", and yes they came. But greatly to our surprise, our Fray Multi-Post Summarizer identified two main strands:
1)You shouldn't eat any meat
2) If other people want to eat dogs why shouldn't they.
Remarkably few posters tried to argue that dogs are different and should be protected.

We like William's: "Get down off your self-absorbed high horses and give others the same right that you expect in return (plus, the French are very anxious to use your horses to serve with a reduction demi-glaze sauce on a bed of shallots)." Turtle says dog-eating is much more widespread than people suspect, and "can be had in many major U.S. cities." We also enjoyed Loran's gleefully gruesome prediction that your dog would eat you if it had to. Thomas M. Schaefer thinks there may be reasons why different races have different attitudes, and that "Dogs have earned a place at our side, not on our table." The Bell says a dog is pretty useless, and is "a bag of meat on legs," but he was trying to be provocative, and may have been using irony too. Yukon definitely was, and those are the names of regular Fraysters in his post.

Reader Comments From The Fray:

Rationally speaking, stronger ethical arguments could be made for not eating any meat at all than for eating the some-meats that we do, as a culture. But no one except Will S. is pretending that dietary taboos are a rational matter. Emotion rules the palate. In this case, it is entirely understandable if not reasonable per se that those for whom "dog" comes with an association of love and companionship would have a difficult time with dog-eating as a practice. It's true that it might, even in this case, be more rationally consistent for animal-rights activists to argue on behalf of all animals rather than just the chosen dog, but if the emotion card can win on the dog front, I don't see why they should feel any compunction or logical scruple in playing it so as to get at least one mammal off the menu.

--J

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

Throughout history, humans have demonstrated that they just can't resist an opportunity to tell other people what not to think, what not to read, what not to eat, and who not to screw. I figure its a blessing if the controversy fails to inpire both sides to go after one another with guns.

--Deodand

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

Go ahead, Saletan, douche is with your disgusting moral relativism. Sure, it sounds OK to eat dog. At least for Koreans. But before you know it, somebody'll be eating locdog. Then doggydevil. Who's after that? kit? See, it's a slippery slope. If you let people eat hamsters, next they want to eat Fraysters. No, what we need is an absolute morality. When nobody can do anything, then nobody can do anything wrong! Draw the line at dogs, and you won't have to worry about abortions, contortions, conversions, perversions, perpetrators, masturbators, masseurs, poseurs, bad posture, bad checks, check kiting, sex kittens, or sex.

--Yukon

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

Don't let anyone ever tell you that you must respect other cultures. Yes, you should tolerate them, but you are not obligated to respect them. Let 'em do what they want and just make fun of them. Some Americans eat mountain oysters and turkey fries. (Pig and chicken testicles, respectively) It isn't necessarily wrong, but feel free to make fun of them.

--Ashwan Karamchandani

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

If someone raises a pit bull from a puppy for the sole purpose of living a short but profitable lifetime of mauling other dogs, does this make dogfighting okay? Bardot would have to say "yes"...that was the dog's purpose, and it reflects the owner's attitude.

--Mangar

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

There may be ethically defensible reasons for not eating endangered animals, or especially intelligent ones like chimpanzees, but why should these matter if one enjoys ape meat…? The answer, of course, is that it doesn't matter, unless we say it does. And we do, on all sorts of subjects, sometimes for reasons that command the reasoned assent of all mankind and sometimes out of simple prejudice borne of the customs of our own culture going back many generations. There is nothing wrong with either one.

As to the Koreans and dog meat, they can ignore the criticism and be considered backward. Or, they can abandon what is after all a minor and superfluous component of the diet of a minority of their people in the interest of fitting in better with a world community that offers Korea much more than it demands in return. In the process they might find, as the West has, uses for the dog worthier than a restaurant entree.

--Joseph Britt

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

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