South Korea’s parliament passed a bill Tuesday banning the breeding and slaughter of dogs for consumption, ending the traditional yet controversial practice of eating dog meat after years of nationwide debate.
"Breeding animals for consumption is fine, except this one."
It is slightly odd how people are like, "cows? Gimme that burger. Sheep? Mmm, mint sauce. Chicken? Batter that baby up". But then suddenly everyone turns into a vegan when it's a dog or a horse.
I've got no interest in eating dog meat, but where's the consistency?
I've got no counterpoint, but I had the same realization, and it has made me question not being vegan. I'm like 80% without trying, but also replacing eggs and cheese is difficult
I like to get eggs from my neighbors who have backyard chickens if they have extra. I can see them, know they're not in pain, or mass produced :)
Cheese I still have no idea. Their isn't anything easily available, like almond milk for dairy milk. The vegan ones I've tried (years ago) are gross and full of emulsifiers. Always striving/looking though.
There's none, it's based on what society tells you to feel empathy for. Dog eaters and corrida enjoyers are no different from people eating massively produced industrial chicken, they just live in an environment where it is normal to do that.
The base difference is that dogs evolved side by side with our species to develop and return emotional bonding and feedback with humans.
All other animals we managed to domesticate, at best, tolerate us or fear us. Cute little photos of cows and pigs enjoying being hugged and petted are exceptions, not norm.
I've been trying to understand, for years, what happened to turn dogs and cats food in asian countries (beside famines, hence desperation) but every single source I was ever able to find always gets muddled in exotheric notions of ”medicinal" use or some other folklore high tale.
For context: in Vietnam, cat meat is often served as being "little tiger".
To the extent of my knowledge, the rest of the world never needed to wrap an animal in an exotheric tale to declare it as potential food.
It's purely for a cheap optics win. President Yoon is a fascist incel that has been taking L after L, so he worked to ban dog meat despite almost nobody eating it except the absolute poorest of society. Dog meat isn't a delicacy, it wasn't something people ate because they saw it as high status, it was largely abandoned by an increasingly westernized South Korea, except for those who couldn't afford anything else. Barely anyone was eating it.
Instead, it's virtue signaling by a fascist looking to grab cheap publicity wins rather than actually making good systemic change. Dog meat wasn't an especially pressing concern, it was an almost gone practice out of necessity, coming from food insecurity, especially during and after the Korean War.
TL;DR still a good thing, but ultimately just a publicity stunt to distract from the fascist President Yoon butchering the economy and targeting women, minorities, and disabled people.
We domesticated a highly emotionally intelligent animal. Who cares if there's "consistency", if they were killed to make it consistent it wouldn't be better.
I downvoted this post as I don't find this uplifting at all. I don't eat meat, and I love my dog, but there's no reason to single out dog meat consumption other than cultural norms and globalization. It seems like an unreasonable position for the South Korean government to have taken.
I'm interested, and I don't know anything about South Korean meat production.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that people should eat dogs. I'm arguing that meat production tends to be horrific, and treating dogs any differently is ignoring some major issues in favor of human bias. I do know something about US factory farming, and it's horrific: cruel to animals, environmentally unconscionable, and a social justice issue for humans working in and living near plants (for example, hog farms in North Carolina). I'm not sure how much worse dog farming could be. We just have more sympathy for them.
I've never really gotten the controversy on this one, the only real difference is dogs are the only primarily carnivorous mammal we as a species eat in any volume. Otherwise the problem appears to be mostly emotional, like I have a furball and I'd never eat him but I don't have an emotional connection with the beef marinating in the fridge.
I'm actually surprised this is in uplifting news, unless outlawing meat consumption at all and enforcing veganism is uplifting. Which it might be to some people, but I like eating meat.
I'm eagerly awaiting lab-grown meat to become cheaper than slaughtered meat, though!
I would LOVE it if they had lab grown meat that could approximate real types of meat. I would stop eating slaughtered meat immediately and never go back.
In the attempt to seem intellectual, people say the craaaaaziest things. Is it that hard to believe that dogs are different from other animals, both domesticated and otherwise? I don't even think you need to be an animal behaviourist to understand that some animals are much, MUCH more emotionally intelligent than others. Comparing a dog to a chicken or cow is just nuts to me.
There are countless studies proving the high emotional intelligence of dogs. People are conflating this with general intelligence with pigs. Sorry you're being downvoted, you're not wrong.