Eating Animals I: Why not eat dogs

I have started reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.

My delightful wife got it from the library for me. However I have recently been convinced that I should probably be buying books rather than borrowing them, so perhaps I should buy it.

Anyway, I'm a slow reader, I'm usually reading between five and ten books very very slowly at a time, and so I thought I might blog my way through this one.

Safran (from now on I'll call him this, apologies to the man if he prefers S-F) argues for eating dogs. What's the difference?, he points out. Pigs can show affection, fetch balls, and whatever else dogs can do. In fact, cows and even chooks are apparently just as capable as dogs (intelligent is the word we usually use, I suppose). He points out that many cultures around the world, and throughout history have eaten dogs. From an ecological point of view, hundreds of millions of dogs in the US are 'destroyed' each year, so it's just a waste not eating them. In fact, dealing with all that meat is a significant environmental concern. Much of it is processed and fed to livestock! Cut out that weird, wasteful, middle step, and just eat the dog meat yourself.

Why not?

I must say I was sold. We should be eating dogs, it's an ecological crime not to.

Of course, the dogs will keep coming up. I think it's largely for one reason: it's considered immoral, and in most cases is illegal, to treat dogs the way we treat farm animals. If you torture a dog, you can go to prison. If you permanently lock a dog in a dark room, confined to a cage not bigger than itself, I hope you can go to prison, but if not, I'm certain that nobody will like you. I could go on.

So why the double standard?

Reading this book has coincided with my being quite ill. I can't eat much, and I respond very badly to meat at times. I have been eating almost vegetarian (something we've been planning to do but never actually did for a couple of years now). So this book is particularly interesting at the moment, even though the illness is completely irrelevant. But if I become vegetarian for two simultaneous reasons, then I suppose it's twice as likely to stick?

Incidentally I should mention that I don't want to misrepresent Safran, and I apologise if I do, and at the beginning of the book he says this is not a book advocating vegetarianism...