Chinese cultural challenge — keeping pet dogs and eating dogs?

I just ran onto a business story on the Internet which says that Chinese spending on pet food and pet care for 2008 is expected to rise about 15 percent over last year. That story also explained that Chinese people still traditionally eat dogs, as well as keep dogs for pets. As the story graphically put it:

"We still eat dog, but not this kind of dog," Liu Ming, a pet shop salesman said, pointing to a toffee-colored puppy with floppy ears on sale for about 500 yuan, or $70. "We eat much bigger dogs."

In the days of Mao, pets were considered a bourgeois indulgence. Now the cute dogs sold in pet shops are spared, while homely mutts tend to be sold at live animal markets as the main ingredient in dog meat stew.

Many years ago, my wife and I lived on an Indian reservation in the state of South Dakota. We saw first-hand evidence that the good people on that particular reservation used puppies as a food source -- not regularly, but only as a special dish. Their language for it was "Shunka Wa-Hapee" (the spelling is just my best guess) -- which simply means "puppy stew."

Could you handle the cultural adjustments it might take to eat dogs and/or cats if you suddenly found yourself living in a culture where that was done? How would you feel about keeping certain dogs or certain cats as pets, yet eating their "cousins" (perhaps even litter mates??) for lunch?

I bring all this up because we in America, and actually most countries of Western European origin, grow up thinking of certain animals as pets, other animals as part of our food source. But who's to say, really?

Should we, therefore, all become vegans? Because when you get right down to it, ANY animal we choose to use as a food source could just as easily be treated elsewhere as a pet.

Something to think about, I guess.

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