In South Korea, some savour last season of legal dog meat | Hacker News Reader

In South Korea, some savour last season of legal dog meat

reuters.com

19 pointsspeckx25 comments

Other than in terms of human opinion, in what sense is eating dog less ethical than eating cow or pig? I love my dog, don't intend to eat her, and don't want anyone else to eat her. But given my fondness for eating cows and pigs, I can't justify a dog meat ban on my friends and neighbors.

I'm a fool who looks for coherence and reason in the laws I'm forced to obey. Which would be an odd thing to find in a democracy.

Yeah I think a lot of folks in the west suffer from cognitive dissonance when it comes to animals, the meat industry, and morals.

Curious what dog meat even tastes like / why someone would choose dog meat over beef/pork/chicken.

I had a high school friend that was born here in the US but his family were Vietnamese immigrants many many years ago. We'd often hang out at his family's house and they were very welcoming and had a "family" style cooking approach with large pots of cooked rice, vegetables and other things set out and you were welcome to always grab a bowl. They often imported native food stuffs so I was fond of the spices and peppers they often cooked with.

One day, I ended up over at his house before he actually had returned home from school. I was hungry and no one was actually at the house at that moment in time and I just helped myself to a bowl of rice and vegetables and there was this extremely stringy looking dried meat that was also set out. So I helped myself to some of that as well.

As I was eating, my friend showed up and I commented on the unique flavor of the meat because it didn't taste like chicken, pork, etc and asked him what it was. He deadpan looked me in the face and told me it was dog.

After that, I always made sure to verify what exactly it was I was consuming rather than helping myself. I don't know what the point of this post really is - but I'm glad that dog meat consumption is on the decline and I could have lived the rest of my life without knowing what dog meat tastes like.

It wasn't bad.

You can still see it everywhere in Hanoi.

Absolutely right. Pigs, for example, are not less intelligent or affectionate than dogs.

Specifically for South Korea:

Most horrifically, there is a widely held belief that in order to produce tender meat, dogs should have high adrenaline levels right before they die. To achieve this, dogs are sadistically made to experience extreme fear and suffering in the lead up to their deaths.

https://awionline.org/awi-quarterly/winter-2012/friend-or-fo...

is that really true? I struggle to imagine it.

I was told this by a second-generation Korean immigrant who's not a fan of the practice either. I don't know if it's still common but it's not something that would be advertised outside of their culture.

Koreans widely believe that sleeping with a fan on can kill you.

People believe dumb shit.

That’s interesting. In most western slaughter systems for beef or lamb the trend has been to make the animals as calm as possible to avoid “dark cutters”

https://www.beefresearch.ca/fact-sheets/dark-cutting-beef/

My main opposition would be eating carnivore meat seems wasteful in resources, and also it tastes bad. Even bear that eat lots of berries never tasted appetizing to me.

But I don't have a big problem with people eating dog as long as they are well cared for and humanely slaughtered like any other farm animals.

> Other than in terms of human opinion

That's the point though. We don't eat horse either in many areas, for the same reason. Ever heard the phrase, "cattle, not pets" when referring to managing systems? As humans, we tend to form bonds with specific individual dogs, cats, horses, etc. But cattle, not really. That's not to say the animal doesn't have the ability, but they don't easily fit into our lifestyle. (I can let a dog loose in my house while I go to work - a cow, not so much.)

It's largely arbitrary.

Your culture is what tells you it's acceptable to eat a dog but not a cow. If you lived in Belgium or Kazakhstan you'd feel fine about eating horse. If you lived in parts of India, eating beef would be as unthinkable as eating dog.

I just came back from a steakhouse in Toulouse that had horse on the menu. It's common in France too.

I lived in Montreal as a poor student and would eat ground horse because it was affordable (Quebec has a horse meat industry - viande de cheval). It tasted like a leaner ground beef and cost the same.

I also ate canned snails which were also affordable (CAD1.99 per can if I remember correctly).

Have you ever left your own little country lmao? There is like a literal billion people not eating beef in India alone and a lot of them see cattle as sacred

Yes; I've genuinely lost track of how many countries I've been to - and I'm not referring to layovers. It is possible for one to forget about the cultural nuances of a country literally on the other side of the planet, though. Apologies for not appealing to your own specific experiences. And if that's your takeaway, you're missing the point entirely.

I traveled to Catalonia some time ago, and of course I expected to meet some very traditional and unfamiliar cuisines and traditions. Ultimately, I ate so well that I gained 15 pounds. Needless to say, I had no trouble adapting to their foreign customs!

One thing I noticed is how markedly different their "Chinese restaurants" were. One of the English translations of a dish was "like ants crawling on a tree" and while it wasn't real ants, piqued my curiosity about what sort of dish would evoke that flavor?

The horchata was considered a national treasure, and I came to find out that it is nothing like the Latin American drink, being made instead from a plant called "tiger nuts". When I informed my fiancée that Mexicans flavored it with cinnamon, she said that sounded strange but delicious.

We went shopping in a Carrefour and I was sort of haunted by the pigs legs curing out in the open air. Of course we also saw room-temperature chicken eggs. Fiancée took me to an aisle full of olives and said I could choose any. There were nearly hundreds of varieties which bewildered me so much that I couldn't choose at all!

The most gross-out tradition of theirs was the "caganer" or "shitting boy" on Christmas, with a corresponding poop log, that is ultimately beaten with sticks for fun and candy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ti%C3%B3_de_Nadal

But more to the point, my fiancée helped me sample various sausages, and pointed out that one particularly large sausage was horsemeat. And coming from rather conventional USA Midwestern stock, I had never consumed horsemeat at all, almost as if it were taboo or simply unavailable as a food item. And yeah, it wasn't bad, and really I think any choices of meat, deep down, are simply cultural conventions and/or taboos.

Room temperature chicken eggs is the norm a lot of places. The main distinction is whether they are washed.

If they are washed, there is less risk of salmonella on the outside, but at the cost of a risk of micro fractures which means you need to refrigerate to reduce the risk of bacterial growth penetrating the egg.

> The most gross-out tradition of theirs was the "caganer" or "shitting boy" on Christmas,

Wow, you were not kidding. On the wiki page there is this song

Shit, tió, Christmas log do not shit herrings, for they are too salty, shit nougats for they taste better. Shit, tió, almonds and nougats, and if you don't want to shit I will hit you with a stick! Shit, tió!

Fucking hilarious!

If you were actually looking for coherence you would consider that both are unethical.

The only reason you’re not actually adhering to coherence, as you said, is your fondness for eating cows and pigs.

Thats hardly a justification for an unethical act.

I get to coherence by concluding that it would be ethical to eat my dog. I just prefer not to.

if we didnt eat them they woouldnt exist as they are today. dogs are not like that. you are someone who thinks he is being clever by playing dumb but you are just dumb

I met someone at a party in San Francisco who had been an American soldier stuck in a place without support in Afghanistan with his squad. He said dog bbq was pretty good, especially the ribs.

so much for Chinese eating dogs, it's way more prevalent in Korea than in China, even if you wanted dog meat in Beijing you have the best odds finding it in Korean restaurant

personally was never interested in dog meat, tried snake, didn't like, ants/crickets meh, bush rat is OK probably better than frog, donkey already better than pork, but my favorite is (Sichuanese) bullfrog, such a shame we don't eat them in Europe, amazing combo of great fish like meat with easy bones like chicken

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