But I too draw the line at eating dogs and cats, except during extreme survival situations where it's eat your pet (or fellow human) to avoid starvation. I feel eating canids and felids as taboo as eating a primate, or eating a human.
By this argument and amount of places (not people), eating a primate might be less taboo than eating a canid or felid?
As an American, I feel the same cultural taboos and they’ve kept me from eating some things but I’ve been reconsidering. Horse and rabbit were delicious.
What about coyote or mountain lion though? Those are still but seldom eaten in America mostly by hunters.
Some people draw the line at not eating predators not because of cultural taboo but because of bio accumulation issues.
Fascinating ethnobiology and moral boundary discussion.
I cannot think of a land-dwelling meat-eating animal human routinely eat. We eat chicken, but they eat anything including rocks, and they're towards the bottom rank of good-tasting meats anyway.
It always interests me to consider just how relative taboos can be.
Only one country isn't it ?
Nepal’s population is 82 percent Hindu. This means many people from Nepal respect cows very much.
It is legal to eat beef in Nepal and many major hotels will serve it. However, it is illegal to kill a cow within the country.
Really, dogs, primates, and humans should be the only animals that are okay to eat.
Otherwise you're saying that it's okay to kill and eat thinking, feeling creatures as long as they're sufficiently different from yourself.
Plus, only humans can consent to being eaten— In theory, anyway, though I wouldn't want to see any system that claims it can actually respect that honestly.
Maybe when we were nomads and the dogs roamed around freely around the tribe.
But most dogs today are locked in, most of the time and when they get outside, they are on a leash. Totally dependant on their human masters.
I don't think I would describe that relationship as a partnership.
Then there is the concept of breeding them, to establish certain "cute" traits, but cause great pain and misery to the animal:
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualzucht (german)
I would argue, the native american tribes, who also did eat their dogs, treated them better overall, than humanity does today on average. So many dogs bred for running around, are lucky today, if they get to walk around outside for more than 20 minutes. This I would call betrayal.
Here[0] is an English-language explanation of the term Qualzucht (with the English translation given as "torture breeding").
That German article also references a BBC documentary, which has its own English Wikipedia entry[1].
[0]https://www.petethevet.com/qualzucht-is-a-term-that-should-b...
Do you relatively equate this to how we treat other animals right now, killing the planet's livable ecosystems while exclusively creating living spaces and amenities for these domestic pets and treating the nature they come from as second class? Tens to hundreds of thousands of unique species and subspecies go extinct at previously unrecorded rates, but selective breeding of vanity traits in pet animals remains a common past time. There's clearly an attachment to these animals and breeds that keeps them in our conscious above others to consider it worthwhile to hold them in public reverence in a way that can still be described as companionship.
We've flipped the needle on adapting them for survival companionship to (essentially) slaved ownership with the aftereffects like you've mentioned, but I think zooming in on the scale of an individual societies' treatment won't generally be favorable. We barely even treat our own species with a level of achievable compassion for anyone deemed undesirable or are a lower class, the betrayal starts earlier than our treatment towards dogs.
I only talked about dogs and humans.
Do you really think it makes sense to always talk about everything? The topic was about dogs and humans and this is what I was talking about. Nothing more, even though surely I could. Topics are connected and I do not neceasarily disagree to what you said, but sorry, this is indeed not my preferred form of discourse.
Show me evidence that co-evolution with rats and cockroaches is anything like this.