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Comment by not_kurt_godel | Hacker News Reader

> ask if if people eat dog meat

If southern China is anything like northern Vietnam, which I have been led to believe it is, then dog meat consumption is widespread - I have seen it with my own eyes. According to Wikipedia, 20 million dogs are killed in China for consumption per year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_meat#Mainland_China Most people, including myself, find the idea of eating dog meat abhorrent, and yet it is a cultural norm in China.

10,000 people were killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and many of them were deliberately squished into mush by tanks. The thought of that happening in the West is beyond the scope of my imagination. Chinese people live in a world of brutal, ruthless dictatorship that will literally grind them to mush under tank treads by the thousands if they protest. To act as if finding that supremely unappealing and objectionable is "warped" is delusional.

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> Most people, including myself, find the idea of eating dog meat abhorrent, and yet it is a cultural norm in China.

Have you ever asked yourself why? Pigs are roughly comprable to dogs in intelligence[1], yet we eat them by the millions. There is little ethical distinction here - instead purely a cultural one.

[1] http://animalstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

I got curious to try horse meat in the US recently, only to find that it's essentially banned from consumption throughout the entire country, through a combination of local laws and congress defunding horsemeat inspection (making it impossible for horse meat to satisfy USDA requirements). I understand banning dog meat, to an extent, considering I would never eat it - although I agree that others should be allowed to. But horses?

To my surprise it seems that horses in the US still become food at some point. They first have to be shipped to Mexico, where it is legal to slaughter and butcher them for meat, but not to consume them. The meat is shipped to Asia and Europe where the consumption is acceptable and legal.

The commonly cited reason behind horse meat being illegal is that horses are given drugs throughout their lives that may make their meat unfit for consumption. Yet there are no provisions for consuming horse meat that is raised like normal livestock. Indeed, whenever horse meat becomes an issue in the US, activists take action, which lends credence to the idea that the ban is more moralistic than a regular safety precaution.

The idiotic part is that this doesn't prevent horses from being slaughtered and eaten. Instead, horses are shipped thousands of miles to Mexico, where many die due to the heat on the journey, before being slaughtered anyway. All I wanted was to try what I've read described as "like very lean beef"

In Europe you find cheap American horse meat on the counter sometimes. It's far cheaper than local alternatives and i honestly never tried it to compare. Horse meat generally isn't bad. Not my favorite but a steak done by a pro is definitly a new taste experience that's worth it.

I totally think that this 'eat animal' 'pet animal' thinking is beyond stupid and only shows how limited we humans think.

The simple answer is that dogs are carnivores so they can't be bred and raised economically for slaughter. Therefore any dog meat you eat is from wild dogs. Wild dogs are also tame enough to stay close to humans, which means they are likely to be feeding off a lot of human waste. Any dog meat you eat is likely to be gamey and full of parasites. It's not just a cultural distinction.

That's not really an answer at all. Eating dog isn't seen as abhorrent because of the possibility of consuming parasites or the quality of the meat. It's seen as abhorrent because we view dogs as trusted companions capable of basic emotion. GP was merely stating that this quality, which is the one that actually causes people to scoff at dog-eaters, is also present in pigs.

Dogs and humans have co-evolved[0] for approximately 30,000 years[1] (for reference, agriculture is only 10-15k years old[2]). Human-dog gaze can cause the same effect as parent-child gaze.

[0] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6232/333

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_domestic_dog

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture#History

Dogs have evolved/been bred for tens of thousands of years to instinctively bond with, trust, and genuinely love humans. Their biological purpose is to be our companions and helpers. Eating them is a primal act of betrayal and pure cruelty. It is an active rejection of some of the most beautiful facets of humanity and of life in general for the sole purpose of eating something that tastes like chicken.

As someone else have pointed out there is no legitimate economic reason to raise dogs for food due to their being carnivores. If people are starving to death then sure, eat dogs to survive. Otherwise my point above stands.

Pigs may be smart, but they have no such special relationship with humanity beyond being domesticated for food. Killing a pig is not killing an animal whose brain is physiologically structured to love you. And while I personally eat pork & beef, I don't necessarily think that people who view it as abhorrent are wrong. 95% of animal consumption in today's world is abhorrently wasteful and destructive. I will gladly eat lab grown meat when it's widely available and of acceptable quality, which can't come soon enough.

10000 casualities is the worst estimation around. Not saying it's false, it's just an estimation. Red Cross estimated ~2500 deceased while Chinese government numbers were below 1000.

The number of injuried people was very high also. And the arrests afterwards were numerous, too.

> Most people, including myself, find the idea of eating dog meat abhorrent

A Muslim person might find someone eating pig morally abhorrent and a Hindu may find someone eating beef reprehensible.

Grow up — people can eat what they like and what’s food is going to differ between places. If you prioritize your own personal food preferences over the right of others to eat a perfectly ethical food, you’re just spreading xenophobia.

I have never understood why people are so upset that other humans eat animals.

Dog meat consumption is indeed widespread in parts of Hunan, guizhou, guangxi, Yunnan, places that are near to northern Vietnam. Not all chinese eat dog, most don’t, but some do (the same is true about Korea and correspondingly parts of northern China). It isn’t a cultural norm in all of china, China is just very diverse.

> The thought of that happening in the West is beyond the scope of my imagination.

You just have to go back to the times when Hitler ruled large parts of Europe.

> 10,000 people were killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and many of them were deliberately squished into mush by tanks

Be aware that that is the highest end of a very contested range of estimates. While I by no means believe the governmental estimate of "0-300", 10,000 is so huge I personally find it hard to believe.

As always the truth is probably somewhere in between. I personally believe the number was probably between 500 and 1,000 dead. It was a brutal repression of a student protest, not an extermination.

It could be in between, it could be much worse. There was no way in estimating very accurately, so we shouldn’t just take the middle as the truth. Besides, most of the casualties occurred outside of the square when the city basically rioted, and it was in the government’s interest not to count bodies.

> it was in the government’s interest not to count bodies

Absolutely. So long as we remember it's in other party's interests to boost the body count, too. You're right though - we'll never know.

Yes, but the government could have answered the question with a real investigation at the time, while the other parties could not. At any rate, whenever you use the military to do what riot police should be doing instead (China lacked non-lethal riot suppression capabilities at the time), it is going to be very messy.

BTW dog meat is not to uncommon in switzerland.

I’ve never seen dog meat offered in Switzerland before. What parts?

2 days late. But in case you are really curious this is only in more rural areas like Schwyz. Some people in the cities don't even know. So it's not actually normal

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