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Growing up in a Chinese family, you never hear enough stories about how it was back then—at least not according to my parents. They love to talk about the old days and that’s how it was all the time. My parents were never bored with the same stories they kept telling us (my sister and I). Funny how every story they told was somehow designed to get our sympathy and make us proud of them, or to make us feel less about ourselves for having more than they did.

My dad often spoke of his struggles which often included the type of things he had to eat to survive. Delicacies would range from plants, like banana tree roots, to insects, like beetles, to animals, like rats. These unfortunate times were often retold with such a passion and weird sense of pride that neither of us would remind our parents that we heard it many times before. Sometimes, my dad would talk about the joys of his childhood and he would reminisce about the things he used to enjoy doing. One thing he would always talk about was eating dog meat.

He would often claim that dog meat was, “the best tasting meat ever.” Growing up in the western side of the world surely didn’t help me understand his enthusiasm. We often hear that, “dogs are a man’s best friend.” They are lovable and cute. Why would anyone want to eat them? As a kid, I thought that eating dog was the most insane thing to do. If you could look at a dog and call it your friend, how can you eat a friend? As naïve as I was, I thought dogs were one of the few animals that people would not think of eating. However, as I got older and less ignorant, I came to realize that there really isn’t any kind of animal that people do not eat.

I never really questioned my dad about it as a kid. As the Chinese saying goes, “he has eaten more salt than I have eaten rice” (though I doubt that since he was too poor to eat much salt as a kid). Every time he spoke about it, I would imagine him eating a dog that looked like Lassie. Watching Lassie reruns everyday surely didn’t help that image. The truth was, if he said it was good, who was I to say otherwise?

After a few more years of hearing how good dog meat was, I grew more curious than horrified. I was used to hearing my parent’s stories about eating weird things and began to understand that it was part of who they were. They did what they had to do. When you are starving, you have to eat what you can to survive and growing up in a poverty stricken place like where my dad was from, they didn’t have a choice as to what they wanted to eat. Everyday, they were looking for a full meal and not too many of those came by during the course of an entire year.

One day I asked my dad if he thought it was cruel to eat dog and his answer surprised me. He said that he in fact did think it was cruel, but technically not any crueler than eating pork or beef. I replied it was different and he asked me how. I thought long and hard to find the answer to this question. Why is it okay to eat pork, but not okay to eat dog meat? I replied because dogs were smart and that they were pets. He replied that it wasn’t a custom for Chinese people to have pets, nor was it economically feasible. They did have a cat, but they never took care of it. It was just something that was attached to their family, but they never had to feed it or bathe it. He said that if they were hungry and had to eat it, they would’ve, though it would be a last resort since cat meat wasn’t tasty (but that’s another story for another day). He explained that in China, dogs were bred to be eaten like how cows are bred in the US. They served no other purpose. They couldn’t plow land like an ox, nor lay eggs like chickens. It was safe to sleep with your door open because there were no thieves and there was just nothing to steal because everyone was so poor.

So why is it wrong to eat dog meat? Why am I too embarrassed to tell my friends that my dad has eaten it before and loves it? That is the crux of the whole issue. There isn’t really a substantial reason as to why you can’t eat dogs. It is merely a western idea that eating it is considered taboo because they have a connection with them. Right before the 2002 World Cup when Japan and Corea co-hosted the event, there were threats of a world-wide (more like western-wide) boycott of Corea because, “Corean people ate dog meat.” It was later discovered that in fact, only a fraction (approximate 10%) of the population ate dog meat, but nonetheless, organizations applied pressure on the country as well as to FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, to force Corea to pass legislation to outlaw dog meat. The real questions here are why and how. Why should Corea have to pass such a law and if they do agree to, how would they do it?

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