People in the U.S. and in much of the world don’t eat dogs and cats. But it goes beyond that. If you even mention<\/i> the idea of eating dogs and cats, people will get very upset and try to change the subject. There is clearly some taboo here – something that goes beyond the rational.<\/p>\n
On an emotional level, it’s as though dogs and cats have an intermediate place in our collective consciousness – somewhere between “human” and “animal” – and for this they get a free pass out of our food chain. It’s clearly not a free pass that we collectively extend to other animals. People are perfectly content to watch a film like “Babe” and then go home and cook up some pork chops, without batting an eye. But even the idea<\/i> of somebody frying up Rover or little Tigger will send most people into a tizzy.<\/p>\n
I was involved in a discussion last week about this, and somebody raised the theory that there is some co-evolution going on here. There are sound practical reasons for humans to cohabit with dogs and cats. Dogs were the first burgler alarms – their barking has probaby saved many a soul from hostile invaders over the millennia. Cats, of course, have historically been the main line of defense against disease-carrying competitors for human food sources, such as rats and mice.<\/p>\n
If you gain a survival advantage from spending time in the company of another species, it probably furthers that advantage to develop an emotional attachment to members of that species. And this attachment will go both ways – humans can afford protection and a steady food supply to the dogs and cats in their company, and so dogs and cats would have co-evolved to want to hang out with us as well.<\/p>\n
One glaring contradiction to this theory is that canine exceptionalism is not universal among humans. In the markets of Shanghai you can purchase a dog for the purpose of cooking and eating at home – a dog that looks very much like that cute stray many Americans and Europeans would welcome into a loving family.<\/p>\n
So what is going on here? Why are pigs and cows – even those pigs and cows that people on a farm might bond with and feel affection for – suitable for eating upon their demise, whereas dogs and cats are not?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
People in the U.S. and in much of the world don’t eat dogs and cats. But it goes beyond that. If you even mention the idea of eating dogs and cats, people will get very upset and try to change the subject. There is clearly some taboo here – something that goes beyond the rational. … Continue reading “Dogs and cats”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":717,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions\/717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}