Wednesday, January 16, 2002

DOG-EATING UPDATE: William Saletan on Slate has devoted an article to it and it's the best defense of dog-eating I've ever seen and exposed the cultural prejudices of those who are against it. A sample:

Strip out Bardot's silly arrogance and her Korean colleagues' sentimentality, and their philosophy boils down to this: The value of an animal depends on how you treat it. If you befriend it, it's a friend. If you raise it for food, it's food. This relativism is more dangerous than the absolutism of vegetarians or even of thoughtful carnivores. 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.

I'm guessing pure vegetararianism is the only anti-dog eating argument that's actually consistent.

UPDATE: Ginger, of course, has a much longer and better post on the above article.

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