The thing about humans is that we're very good at inconsistent thinking. The way we think about animals is one example where logic gets left behind.
John D. Sutter is a columnist for CNN. In a recent interesting opinion piece he argued that really, we should eat dogs.
The thought of this though repulses most people.
Sutter explains that: "in the United States, we will spend $58.5 billion on pets this year, according to one industry projection. We pamper dogs with Christmas presents; send them to "doggie daycare"; bring them on planes (more than 2 million pets and animals fly per year); and trot them around show rings, judging the perfection of their pedigree."
edition.cnn.com/2014/07/23/opinion/sutter-dog-meat-ethics/ The article includes links to graphic images of dogs who are "stuffed into wire cages and trucked, illegally, across borders in Southeast Asia. The destination: restaurants in Vietnam".
Sutter agrees that this is awful treatment of what are loveable, intelligent creatures; creatures many of us keep as pets.
What Sutter invites his readers to do is to consider the BIG picture.
"Which is this: The cruelty of this trade -- the fact that dogs are smashed into cages; suffocated; "skinned alive, strung up and beaten," according to a CNN report -- is what should shock and sadden you. The fact that people are eating dog meat? That shouldn't. Unless you're vegetarian or vegan...Here in the United States, a place with an unhealthy and ridiculously hipster bacon obsession (witness: bacon donuts, bacon pie, bacon in bloody marys), eating dog could be seen as a reasonable alternative to pig, which is another highly intelligent animal."
While we place value on dogs kept as pets, there are also large numbers of dogs that cannot be homed and these are routinely euthanised. Why not make better use of unwanted dogs?
Sutter argues that "The United States euthanizes 1.2 million dogs per year, according to the ASPCA. Would eating them be so different? It actually could be seen as helpful."
"[U]nlike all farmed meat, which requires the creation and maintenance of animals, dogs are practically begging to be eaten," Jonathan Safran Foer, a vegetarian and novelist, writes in the book "Eating Animals." Euthanizing pets, he says, "amounts to millions of pounds of meat now being thrown away every year. The simple disposal of these euthanized dogs is an enormous ecological and economic problem. It would be demented to yank pets from homes. But eating those strays, those runaways, those not-quite-cute-enough-to-take and not-quite-well-behaved-enough-to-keep dogs would be killing a flock of birds with one stone and eating it, too."
Sutter gets to the crux of the matter:
"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."
What do you think about Sutter's argument? Is it logical? Does it make you feel a little unsettled? Is he outrageous?
Does it make you think? What do you think?
Image:
www.dogster.com