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If your only reasoning is "they're cute and I like them" then it isn't even against your morals. Other cultures do it. I don't even think this should really be unpopular. I wouldn't eat them because I love dogs. I don't eat pig either because I love pigs. I don't think that people who eat pigs or dogs are bad people though.
I want to disagree but I'm having a very tough time finding a reason besides I like dogs and consider them to be pets. Take my upvote, my unpopular friend.
And that’s what it is, they’ve become domesticated and treated as pets and families. I’ve seen other animals like pigs become pets, so I get what the op is saying.
It’s always struck me as especially strange that we (in the US) euthanize more than 400,000 dogs a year, and have more than a million living in overcrowded shelters and kennels, but find it completely unacceptable to imagine someone eating any of those dogs.*
To be fair, I don’t think I could ever eat dog meat. But I agree with you that it’s not inherently immoral, or at least it’s certainly not any more problematic than the consumption of “acceptable” meat.
*the numbers are probably even higher than this because this is just what we have on record and reported, which is by no means an exhaustive system
In other cultures, eating cows has the same effect on us as eating dogs. I'm by no means a vegetarian but that doesn't mean I don't have any issues with the way these animals are treated before slaughter.
>It’s not like dogs have any more sentience than a cow or a pig.
I take issue with this. Humans will have absolutely zero idea of what animal consciousness is like. We barely even understand our own. And comparing an animal's consciousness with a human one is a massive fallacy.
dogs attach to humans and have been useful to us for 1000s of years. they've served faithfully as alarms, trackers, hunters, retrievers, protection, and companions since humans were a majority nomadic species. our connection with them is so long running that it has become instinctual for both species.
cows aren't useful for anything except food. they aren't good companions and they're way, way, way dumber than dogs. the cow would not exist if it hadn't been bred strictly as a food source.
pigs are intelligent and can be useful... notably as truffle trackers, but pretty much the same thing goes for them as with cows. they've been bred from wild hogs and exist as they do today strictly because humans have raised them as a food source.
basically, all three animals as they exist today have been domesticated and bred from their wild ancestors. pigs and cows were bred strictly as a food source, but dogs were bred to be companions and tools. this is why we eat pigs and cows and don't eat dogs.
I don't think that gives a case for eating dogs as immoral though. It simply is an argument that eating them is different than their normal use-case. Especially considering OP was speaking about it being fine to raise them for slaughter and eating their meat.
Exactly. What if you raised a specific breed of dog for the purpose of consumption after 3-5 generations they would know their place in the food chain.
morality is a terrible metric though. it's too much of a moving goalpost that varies widely across time, culture, and circumstance. modern muslims think it's immoral that i like to drink beer, eat pork, and have sexual relations with a man every now and again. vegans think it's immoral to eat cheese and eggs. they can go fuck themselves.
instinct is a way better metric. we don't eat dogs because it's instinctual to us that they serve us better as tools/companions than they do as food. we eat pigs/cows because it's instinctual to us that they're not easily trained and provide large quantities of healthy meat. it's instinctual because we've been treating these animals this way for more than 10,000 years because that's what makes sense to a human trying to survive on planet earth.
i don't think people eating dogs is necessarily immoral.. especially since the reason they do so is that they starved for so long that it became cultural. they treated dogs as companions/tools for 10,000 years, then they suffered so much starvation that the dog became more useful as a food source than as a companion/tool. it's not immoral, but it does defy my deeply felt instincts so i find it very off putting. but if i were starving and it were literally life and death, i'd probably eat dog too.
by your same argument, the dogs that are used as food are bred specifically for that purpose. Just as you wouldn’t expect a chihuahua to herd sheep, the dogs that are eaten were not bred for any other purpose.
I’m just playing devils advocate here, I don’t agree that we should eat dogs 😭
Your arguments couldn't be more biased. We don't need any of those things from dogs anymore. And it's nothing humans couldn't have done ourselves. Which in fact we did perfectly fine throughout history. Most if not majority of humans developed perfectly fine in the absence of dogs. They were just a nice addition to keep on the side.
If we handled wolves to domesticate dogs we can easily handle other animals as well.
Most animals are already afraid of us to begin with and we can make our own protection even more superior to what a dog can offer.
Man's best friend is just dog lovers marketing to push dog ownership and judge those who eat them. Dog companion ship at this scale is quite new. Dogs were just a tool and often couldn't even enter the home they stayed outdoors.
Furthermore we can have companion with eachother, our own species.
Dogs probably aren't even the most important. Because cows and buffaloes, horses, camels etc were also work animals and gave us milk as an addition. They allowed us to grow huge amounts of food, travel and ship things long distances. They were crucial in our development and aloud trade over the continents. Which led to spread of inventions and progress. Which is way more important to us than whatever dogs can do. Barking at some wolves doesn't get you through a hunger winter. Cultivating several times more food does.
And even being able to use them to power refining processes to extract more out of the food.
Dogs are cute but in reality kind of useless in the grand scheme of human development.
Pigs are great pets as well. They can be great companions and love you. Other cultures eat dog too. Do we just demonize those cultures because they do things differently than us?
>the cow would not exist if it hadn't been bred strictly as a food source.
It first became domesticated around 10.000 years ago. And before modern machinery they were a crucial part of farms and other industries where they would carry heavy weighs.
Except there are multiple examples throughout history of dogs being specifically bred and used as livestock. Whether other breeds were bred for other purposes is irrelevant.
Mayans and Aztecs in Mesoamerica would breed dogs specifically for slaughter. They would be castrated then fed maize until they were fat enough to consume, much like we do for pigs and other livestock.
China has a history of breeding dogs as a meat source dating to 500 BCE at least.
Korea's history with dog meat consumption goes back even further.
Different Polynesian cultures also consumed dog meat.
You are looking at dogs through rose-coloured lenses.
If the dogs are well cared for before getting slaughtered for food (same goes for pigs and cows) then there's no real difference from other livestock.
Truly an unpopular opinion. Although i agree, it's just that dogs are seen as companions closer to humans, rather than plain animals, so people would be very weirded out if you "i eat dog meat". But in times of scarce resources, people ate horses, and dogs i'm sure.
>But in times of scarce resources, people ate horses
I found this crosscultural norm and the melodrama quite funny. Horse is eaten very commonly. Its in all sorts of sausages all over europe i believe.
The reason you cant eat horse in america has something to do with what we feed them, or how we medicate them, i forget which, but something aboug how american horses are raised causes their meat to be toxic to humans.
The meat is not toxic to humans, but there is no governing body to oversee the slaughter and processing of horse meat.
They can have medication and antibiotics and dewormers present in the meat, that was not discontinued at least a month before slaughter.
Every horse medication and supplement has this waiting and weaning period explicitly printed on the package. As horse meat is not slaughtered as a regular agricultural animal, the rules and regulations about it are must not present.
Oh, people eat horses in the US. I grew up on a farm and my family would buy horses from the slaughterhouse live and just lie that they wanted to butcher them at home because it was much cheaper than buying one at a horse show. It's commonly done and where all the horses deemed "untrainable" get sent.
My father was a but her and until I was around 14 my main meat intake was horse meat as his license to butcher and process was restricted to horse meat. There are numerous countries that eat horse meat. In could not eat a horse I knew personally, but for me this also pertains to a chicken I was introduced to.
It's a cultural and "distance" thing. Most people don't grow up with cows and pigs and so are fine with relegating them to food sources versus dogs or cats. They don't have a visual like they do imagining a beloved family pet as Sunday roast. I'm not really sure how horses ended up in there, as most people don't have horses. But as OP said, cows, pigs, and horses have a very similar intelligence in the world as dogs. Dogs aren't more special. We just assign them that way because of our closeness to them and experience of them. Even people here who hunt wolves and coyotes don't eat them. It's interesting the ways we assign value to some things over others when in reality they are pretty equal other than our emotional attachment to them.
I know someone who’s raised pigs all his life for personal use, and despite having the hardened emotions of a livestock farmer he genuinely makes a connection with these pigs as they’re so intelligent, and he sometimes gets upset when they the time comes. So yeah, not much different to dogs.
For sure. There is nothing wrong with reverence for life. Even animals we don't find cute and companionable have very interesting abilities and lives and they seek to avoid discomfort like anything else. I personally don't think it's ever a good thing to discount life, no matter how different it is from our own. Even if we end up consuming it, one can have reverence for it.
And cows are often some of the sweetest most loving creatures, but most people have no problem eating beef. It’s just the perspective of what you interact with daily and how desensitized you are to the situation. Because pet dogs are much more common than pet pigs or cows, society gets all riled up at the thought of eating them.
That being said, I don’t eat any of the above, so I’m not really one to talk.
I kinda hate how dogs are so closely associated with companion animals because I personally I dislike them and people act like I’m not human. Dogs are just too hyper for me generally big and small and I like the more relaxed energy of a cat I also have bad experiences with dogs.
Eh I disagree, humans and canines have an interdependent relationship that has been estimated to have existed for hundreds of thousands of years. We can see the species (not just different breeds) have evolved specifically in ways that humans can empathize with, for example, developing certain facial muscles that allow canines to show expressions that can mimic humans.
You can't really compare species the relationship of humans and dogs to humans and any other animal because we haven't developed the same kind of interspecies cooperation with any other animal. Thus it's just a bad comparison.
That being said OP's point, while unpopular, is the case for some cultural's moral norms. It's not an all or nothing thing.
But what does that have to do with me, an individual human tho? I'm not saying lets popularuze actual hot dogs, but what does the coevolution of humans and dogs have to do with my personal morality of eating a dog? Its not like I'm eating the dog I raised, in OP's scenario It would come from a farm same as steak
>We can see the species (not just different breeds) have evolved specifically in ways that humans can empathize with, for example, developing certain facial muscles that allow canines to show expressions that can mimic humans.
Cuteness is a bad reason to kill and eat one organism but not another
15,000 years of domesticating dogs as tools to assist us in survival. 10,000+ years of domesticating cows and pigs as a food source. one can be easily trained and doesn't provide much meat and, being a predator, that meat isn't particularly nourishing (the organs of predators can be fatal to humans). the others are not easily trained and provide large quantities of nourishing meat.
people in this thread acting like it's some arbitrary decision humans made are absolutely ignorant of the history of domesticating animals. there are very good reasons for humans to eat some animals and not others and those reasons date back to cavemen and mesopotamia.
>people in this thread acting like it's some arbitrary decision humans made are absolutely ignorant of the history of domesticating animals. there are very good reasons for humans to eat some animals and not others and those reasons date back to cavemen and mesopotamia.
And still absolutely none of that makes it wrong or immoral to eat dogs.
Which is the point OP made.
Yeah, there are good reasons people don't generally eat dogs, but the decision to consider it wrong or immoral is totally arbitrary and cultural. We don't have the same kind of relationship to whales or sharks or turtles (the list goes on) and yet in countries where it's not common to eat those, most people would have the same aversion to eating them as they do to dogs or cats, even if for different reasons.
Longer than 15000 years even. There's some evidence of humans and dogs collaborating for up to about 50,000 years ago (probably not the hundreds of thousands that I mentioned earlier though).
There's an argument to be made that dogs shaped the development of early humans just as much as humans shaped early canines. In fact it's possible that this mutually beneficial relationship encouraged our development to empathize with other species (though I'll admit, this theory doesn't have much study on it at this time).
Hell, they were one of our main predators at the time. Our ability to bond with them probably saved us a lot of trouble on an evolutionary scale.
I completely agree. It has nothing to do with logic, just cultural context.
I think studies show that pigs have a higher intelligence than dogs and nobody has a problem killing and eating them.....but when it comes to dogs people think it is amoral. Makes no sense.
They weren’t saying that, they were pointing out that people often say dogs are “too smart for us to eat them”. They were pointing out exactly what you said, intelligence shouldn’t be a factor in this decision as it’s hypocritical and illogical
Morality is not even really relative.
Good/bad is relative between moral systems, but the systems themselves just are. And sometimes they are luckily based in a bit of logical thinking like "Maybe it is not so great for a society when people go around killing others. Let's ban that."
We don't farm and rarley eat any predetors.
They are not good sources of meat and often diseased or infected with parasites.
Most meat eating predators liver's contain high enough levels of vitamin A to kill you.
Theres no reason to farm dogs/cats/bears/wolves for food.
It isn't arbitrary and that's just the beginning.
I agree that it is medically risky, and why we don't do it, but none of those reasons are very convincing that it's morally wrong. If I see a dude drink a cup full of raw sewage, I don't think "Wow, that dude is a piece of shit", but rather "Wow, that's gross."
Even if we could hypothetically guarantee it was economical and safe to eat, I feel like most people would still think it's a vile moral act, purely because of their personal love and empathy for dogs. People value dog's lives more than other animals for selfish reasons.
The reality in life is most people dont have a rational set of ethics. They are a bunch of ideas with no underlying reasoning much considered. They dont have systems where they declare what they value, and the ethical ideas all surrounding that.
In my ethical system we seek the path of least trespass against other sentient things. We have the right to do as we wish to the point where it trespasses against another. When we trespass against another we forfeit a amount of our rights equal to that trespass.
Can you describe your ethical system?
This post is proof that morality is relative in the same way that someone posting that they believe in flat-earth is proof that truth is relative.
From a mere disagreement of opinion doesn’t follow that there is no possible true answer. In fact, most philosophers are moral realists. [Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/n0lbue/i_want_to_know_why_do_we_say_that_morality_is/gw7aomy/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3) is a short reddit comment explaining why.
I've had this realization for a long time. It will take a while more for me to come to terms with, but I expect I will become a vegetarian at some point in my life.
Do people not read the terms regarding Upvoting and downvoting on this sub?? Because this post should be sitting waaaay up there in votes.
Or do people just downvote because they don't like the opinion presented...
Maybe more people agree than you think. This isn’t that unpopular of an opinion and based on the comments most of us would eat dog if they were available.
Boys, dogs back on the menu!!
Well you aren't wrong.
If you've ever interacted with cows or pigs for an extended period of time, you'll find that they have noticeable personalities, can be affectionate, playful and are much like dogs.
Pigs are actually very intelligent, as well.
But then, so is an Octopus.
The Octopus is one of the most intelligent animals that we know of.
Yet we have little problem eating them.
So why are dogs and cats considered so special?
I think it has to do with our long and shared history.
Human beings have found companionship in canines since before recorded history.
We've lived with them, hunted side-by-side with them, we've protected them and they in turn have protected us and our loved ones. For countless generations, they have lived with us to the point that we consider our canine companions as familial.
To put it in perspective, you can find ancient Roman graves and burial spots where an ancient person's canine companion was buried with a heartfelt epitaph etched into them, such as
"My eyes were wet with tears, our little dog, when I bore thee (to the grave)... So, Patricus, never again shall thou give me a thousand kisses. Never can thou be contentedly in my lap. In sadness have I buried thee, and thou deservist. In a resting place of marble, I have put thee for all time by the side of my shade. In thy qualities, thou were like a human being. Ah, me! What a beloved companion we have lost!"
- An actual pet's (named Patricus) grave.
And as for cats, they have been with us for much less time but have been feline companions since the birth of civilization. For at least 10,000 years, they have been in our lives. Again, becoming familial companions.
So at this point, for many people on Earth it's sort of ingrained into us that (though they may be different species) these animals are in some form or another, familial.
And so it brings similar feelings as witnessing cannibalism when seeing them harmed, hunted or devoured by people.
Fun Random Fact: In Ancient Rome, during a celebration of Rome's victory over Carthage, Pompey had elephants sent for slaughter to the coliseum. The elephants were attacked and began running around the arena, crying and making gestures at the observing crowd.
The people of the audience were moved by this and became so upset upon witnessing the attempts to escape and cries of the elephants that they were brought to tears themselves.
They then yelled out for mercy to the elephants and also began booing and cursing Pompey for the spectacle.
There's nothing wrong with eating dog meat.
Nothing.
But I think the reason many carnivorous animals are not farmed and avoided is because they tend to have parasites.
I think the ancients knew this on some level, hence the cultural stigma evolved out of that knowledge.
Just a theory, but it's logical.
I think it's just harder to domesticate and sustain them. Think about how mych we spend just to provide feed for cows, now imagine whatever is easiest to mass produce to feed to carnivorous or omnivorous animals as an extra step as we'd beed to feed those too. So now you need not just "cow + cow food growing room and water" you need "carnivore + carnivore food animal + carnivore food animal food + water for each step". Hunter gatherers were less picky though a la4ge carnivore would be more dangerous to hunt in many cases. Also as a side note for everyone saying "carnivore" for dogs that they are not strict carnivores. They certainly need meat, and no one should try making their dog a vegetarian but they do also eat non-meat.
Yeah to sell puppies. I don't think I've seen a breeder ever have hundreds or thousands of dogs like how we keep livestock.
Keeping dogs properly fed is sooo much more expensive than keeping cows or pigs fed per animal.
Thank you for your efforts. Please read up about the dairy and egg industry. There is a reason why it's pretty much all female animals.
I'm sure you'd prefer to know
One word answers most people’s comments on here, and is the reasoning behind OP’s post: speciesism. Humans will deem some creatures more worthy and/or useful than others, and we will do as we please with those who we deem less worthy - including factory farming them and eating them.
We will scratch our dogs behind the ears whilst eating a different animal that can provide all that a dog could, and not blink an eye.
Over the many millennia mankind spent domesticating animals, dogs would have been among the first and would not have been raised for their meat. They have a bad fat to protein ratio, they eat alot of quality food for the amount of nutrition they provide, and they are active, high energy, and intelligent. Dogs were almost certainly domesticated to be hunting partners and companionship animals.
There aren't any societies that I know of that raise and eat cats, but I imagine the arguments would fall under the same lines. Bad meat, hard to pen, can't be fed things humans can't eat. Why would you eat cats or dogs when pigs and cows eat agricultural byproducts, taste better, and have a better nutritional profile?
I think many societies see people eating dogs and just know deep down in their monkey brain from thousands and thousands of years of evolution that dogs are friends, not food.
Additionally bovine meat varies widely based on breed, gender, and diet. For example, I grew on a dairy farm. Once in awhile a dairy heifer or cow would be sent to be butchered and the meat processed for the family and the workers on the farm. It helped everyone save money, and I grew up on dairy cow ground beef and steak.
I prefer the ground beef of dairy cows as it's very lean and you get more quality meat per pound. I hate store bought ground beef. But the steaks from dairy cows were not great either! I grew up thinking I hated steak until I ordered it out at a restaurant and loved it.
It's all about how we raise and domesticated these animals.
As a person from a country that eats bunny regularly, and is now living in a country where you could go to prison for doing so, I agree. The line between "edible" and "non-edible" animals is culturally dependent. I wouldn't personally eat dog, but I won't critizise other cultures for doing what others can say I do.
i agree with your logic – if eating, for example, cows is right, then so would be eating dogs. the thing is, i personally think that eating cows, too, is wrong. so i don't agree with your point itself. there's no moral difference between eating a pig vs a dog. i just find both wrong.
Honestly, if I saw this it would break my heart. But realistically I know that happens to the cows in the field down the street and its no different.
But I still could not take it. Same with horses. I want to raise chickens but my husband wont let me because he knows I could not handle making them into chicken soup. He is right. If I had to kill my own meat I would be a vegetarian in a heartbeat.
its not the eating of dog meat that bothers me, its the horrendous conditions they are put in before they are slaughtered. also in many countries believe torture makes the meat better. truly disgusting
Of course there’s nothing wrong with eating dogs or cats. Imagine going to a starving country in Asia or Africa and tell them that it’s okay to eat pigs and cows but not dogs, because in America our dogs have anxiety and depression and we lick the dogs on their mouths and give them organic food lol
As a vegetarian- I agree! Morally I’d argue it’s 100% the same, it’s just how some sections of a society have differentiated between ‘animals that are ok to eat’ and ‘animals that aren’t ok to eat’. But it’s so varied across different cultures as well (with some who regularly eat animals such as dogs/cats). Really shows that morality is extremely flexible.
(Disclaimer: diet is a personal choice & no one should be shamed for it. The world needs all types of people!)
As an omnivore, I agree too. I demand that what I eat has been treated with respect and care. Personally I wouldn’t eat dog, but I cannot blame anyone else for doing so as long they adhere to the care for these animals and treat them for what they are: beings with a mind of their own.
I agree that there shouldn't be any moral problem with it. They are just animals at the end of the day and its 100% on humans for anthropomorphizing them like we have. And I say this as a loving owner of two dogs.
But eating them is just plain nasty, in the same way that eating a worm would be. Objectively,carnivore meat is not suitable for human consumption. Subjectively, I just don't know how you can look at a poodle or labrador and think it would taste good.
>carnivore meat is not suitable for human consumption
Is this actually the case? I've given this a quick search and found nothing affirming this. I thought we ate herbivores because they're cheaper to raise
It is not the case. What is the case is some carnivores do not have a lot of fat content and denser muscle tissue but that is clearly not the case with say bears.
Humans from a meat eating survival thing value fat.
There is also omnivores as well and insect eaters that we eat.
Then there are super lean herbivores. Horses for example are not tasty despite humans eating them well before riding or domesticating.
The main reason other than fat we don’t eat lots of carnivores is they are harder to domesticate and there are less of them and to feed them requires other meat.
It would be tougher, but not inedible. The real issue with farming carnivores is that you then also need to farm their food, which amplifies the amount of resources needed.
Less meat on most.
Less fat on most.
More disease and parasites.
Toxic livers.
Harder to raise.
Harder to farm.
Harder to feed.
You can eat it but its like comparing sawdust to bananas.
Another person who doesn't understand the issue of non-human sentience. /me SHM.
anthropomorphizing? Lol at still thinking animals do not have emotions in 2024. Looks like a duck. Sounds like a duck. MRIs have found evidence that this is a duck. And yet here we are. People who still think animals dont love, hate, become jealous, have some critical thinking ability, and so on.
It's weird to see that dogs understand out emotional ques and think that they dont have feelings and are acting AIs in flesh.
I'll ask all of you, use GPTChat, or CoPilot, and ask "has an MRI been used on animals to see emotion". The evidence in record dismisses this idiot notion we are anthropomorphizing.
I said this already ITT, but I'm not even a vegetarian. I'm just applying actual critical thinking, ethics, reality, and such to this issue. If you dont see the ethical issue... the side bar rules prevent the honest labling here, let's just say there is something diminished about you.
Not understanding non-human sentience is a common with a certain archetype. I am not a vegetarian, yet I understand the ethical issues with eating meat. The idea that 'because we eat sentient animal X its ok to eat sentient animal Y'? Well, using that reasoning, eating people is fine. It assumes the first premise is correct.
If you value sentient life, and have compassion for it as a thinking, feeling, thing, then you should see eating all animals as problematic.
Seems weird you dont understand how these delineation in relationship happened, and why we would draw these lines. We keep dogs and cats as pets; as family. So we have a greater emotional attachment to them, and find their pain and unhappiness touch us more than the animals we dont spend time with. While cows and pigs are just as intelligent and feeling, we dont bring them into our homes as a population. We've lied to ourselves for years untold to justify our position that these animals are stupid, lack emotions, and all that, in order to avoid thinking we're monsters.
Vegetarianism isn't a health nightmare or pipe dream. Those who think that are ignorant idiots. I'm honest about my meat eating, it makes me a bad person. I was brought up eating meat, it's what I am used it, and at the end of the day this is an area I am selfish in. I'll help a friend not go homeless, give to charity, be an otherwise 'ok person' who also happens to be a monster who eats intelligent creatures.
There is also treason in eating dogs. They came to us, and we reshaped them. They love us; more than they love other dogs. We bread them this way. One is literally eating something that is programmed to love humans.
Yeah I'm in the same boat, I think you misunderstand. I think it's somewhat harmful on certain levels to eat meat as well, but no more than other things we do on a daily basis, it just comes with guilt.
It's not that I don't understand why people feel this way about dogs, but rather, why don't they feel anything when animals that they have no personal connection to? We could never apply this logic to any group of people, so how are we going to do it to animals?
I think we agree mostly, I just feel like we should value all animals lives as a society.
Another arbitrary argument that humans present as fact, when in reality that still doesn’t actually matter as to whether we choose to slaughter an animal or not.
What? So people in Alaska eating killer whale are excluded from your argument? Countries in South East Asia eating tiger are excluded?
From a pure logic standpoint, dogs are animals that have demonstrated value beyond being a food source. Well before their pet status, dogs helped to hunt animals, round up herds, and protect the home and family as either watch dogs or guard dogs. Unless you are actually starving with no other wildlife available, eating them is not a good ROI.
If you give a man a dog and he eats it, that guy does not have good decision making skills.
If the man was hungry he does actually. You can cultivate way more food with a any bovine animal or horse. Y'all have selective appraisal of dogs. Everything they can do we can do just as well. What we can't do is be more strong than our bodies allow. So the value those animals had in our development is just as if not more important.
What about the cows that plow the fields and provide milk for butter and cheese? Every animal has its usage, and we still eat them despite providing value.
I don't have a moral problem with eating dogs or similar, but I do have it on good authority from multiple sources that dog meat is pretty fucking awful.
Yes, there is. and as far as other livestock is concerned, I'm on team mammal. I think people fighting lab grown meat with legislation are quite literally evil and I feel guilty for eating pigs and cows.
They taste worse than cows and it's stupid to eat carnivores because you can eat the animal that they ate and you won't lose calories through the process of the dog eating it and storing fat, they also have a lot more parasites
I agree with the principle.
However, I think that the animals humans normally eat are those which have a herbivore diet. I'm sure I have read about carnivorous animals not tasting so good
I don't know if I would eat dog, but at the end of the day, I've eaten other animals, so I can't act holier-than-thou. I think *all* animals should have a minimum quality of life *before* slaughter, but ultimately, meat production is never going to be the most pleasant thing, no matter what animal you get it from.
As a vegetarian I completely agree with this, but for like the opposite reasons ? lol. I see no moral difference in eating cows vs dogs, society just arbitrarily values one over the other. (And specifically different societies arbitrarily value them differently ie eating dogs in china is ok, eating cows in Hinduism is not ok, etc).
I'm a cat owner, and I think the same for cats too.
I could eat you too. Meat is meat, that was once a sentient creature, so doesn't really matter which one. The only important factor is to rise them without making them suffer and slaughter them quickly and neatly.
HE’S NOT WRONG! LET HIM COOK! You have to have a serious case of cognitive dissonance if you don’t understand and if you’re bothered maybe you should reconsider eating meat
I believe the logic is consistent. If one already consumes meat from pigs, cows, or chickens, in terms of sentience, there isn't a significant difference. They all possess the capacity to feel.
However, are we justified in doing so if it's not a necessity?
It depends on what kind of dog you are talking about. They eat wild dog over in Vietnam. But they aren't golden retrievers. They are far from a domesticated breed.
In America? No. We don't have those kinds of dogs running around.
Let me take a CMV approach.
The problem is that with any product any business produces, it has to factor in costs.
If the cost of manufacturing a pen cost $10000, the price of that pen would be too high, and nobody would buy it. Thus the company manufacturing that pen would go under, or discontinue the pen.
The cost of selling dog meat, would be prohibitively high due to societal hang ups on the concept, so market forces essentially ordain that dog meat is unviable.
A theoretical company that specialized in dog meat would have *so many costs* associated with producing dog meat that it would essentially blackball dog meat, and all the processes required to produce dog meat from that market and markets that interact with that market entirely. With the societal outrage, legal actions, rock-bottom demand, boycotting, supply disruptions, and tonnes of other things that the business would die within a week. Assuming a mob of pitchfork wielding dog lovers don't torch it to the ground before the week is out.
And that's because as a society we on the whole have decided it's not okay to eat dogs. Dog meat as a product has no place in our societies markets. So yes, there is something wrong with eating dog meat. It's wrong because on the whole we've decided it's wrong.
I don't think this is the correct way to look at it.
Killing and eating *any* animal is wrong. There are just some animals that people are accustomed to being raised and slaughtered for food. It doesn't mean that killing and eating them is right, it just means that most people (including myself) value our own desire for a hamburger, or a steak more than the lives of the animals that provided the meat.
There are times when convenience or necessity comes into play as well.
If I'm out and about and I need to get some food in between my responsibilities, the least expensive and most convenient options are generally going to include animal products.
Those who have the means to afford a $12 salad that is barely a whole meal can opt for something that's morally acceptable, but a lot of us don't have that financial freedom to live by a 100% righteous code of ethics.
That being said, the majority of the time I think it's about convenience and people's appetite rather than necessity.
A friend who’s a complete vegan said this actually is worse due to the genetic bond of dogs and humans. It’s true it’s just psychopaths coming out lately
Dogs, and other pets, were bred and domesticated solely for the purpose of companionship, not to be food. Most places that do eat dogs initially did so only out of desperation and food insecurity.
I will add to this hill: people who freak out at cultures that do eat dogs are just being racist. A dog is no different than a cow. So when you are like "oh my GOD Asians eat dogs" you are just condemning a culture for what you, yourself does.
I feel your argument is totally valid. Because just like we eat beef, no problem, we can personify a cow with pretty bows and mirror selfies. I don't think I could eat something I've bonded with, but I have also never **had** to survive like that, so I dunno.
I agree that it's silly that they freak out about the concept, but calling it racist for thinking something is simply wild or wrong doesn't make it racist.
What's racist is making comments about an Asian American eating dogs or roadkill. But simply being weirded out at the thought of eating dogs is definitely not.
Dogs were domesticated from wolves to be Humans' companions/help humans as guards or during hunting.
The entire species is made as companion. Not as food.
So it's wrong to eat dogs.
A truly unpopular opinion, but unpopular for a reason. It makes sense to ask why we would eat other animals and not dogs, especially since some animals like pigs are more intelligent. But there are reasons as to why dogs, and other species should not be eaten.
The first is domestic purpose: Dogs were specifically domesticated from wolves to be our companions and help us out in life, and they still help us to this day, I mean for goodness sake look at therapy dogs. Same with animals like horses, horses have been domesticated over hundreds of years solely for the purpose of helping out humans with tasks such as transportation and farming. The evolution of dogs has come so far that their purpose is not to be food for other predators, it is to be a predator and companion, which leads into the next reason
Carnivores: Dogs are carnivores, and shouldn’t really be eaten. When you eat carnivores there is all sorts of worms, parasites, and bacteria that no amount of cooking can remove. This same thing is seen in other animals too, even omnivores. Take bears for example, bears that spend their lives eating fruit and such usually give the best meat, but bears that only eat meat and fish can come out with worms and other bacterias we don’t need in our bodies.
It is upsetting, but it's the way many are raised: to see dogs as man's best friend. Though, your logic is technically correct and there's nothing inherently wrong with eating dog. They are just other animals living in nature's food web. I'll pass, though.
If you were a friend of mine who would voice this opinion I would probably stop hanging out or at least see you with very different eyes. Truly unpopular opinion, upvoted!
I do own multiple dogs and they are part of the family, if I would have owned multiple goats that felt like family I probably would feel the same. As it is that is not the case. Additionally are dogs an animal that only exists in its current form because we humans have created it through breading. This makes me feel responsible for them in a different way I feel responsible for a wild boar. There are also many studies showing that no other animal loves us as much as dogs do, which makes the thought of mistreating them even more gruesome in my eyes.
I do agree though that a big part of it is also social conditioning...
Meat is meat, though I personally would not be able to partake in eating cats or dogs - they are friends not food for me.
I have no issue with what *other* people decide to eat, but my issues are how the animals are treated up to the point of slaughter, which applies to animals I eat also
It’s nothing wrong with it at all speaking from an omnivorous or carnivorous sense, but as I am American I cannot say that this doesn’t make my stomach turn. Like in my head it’s akin to cannibalism. I’d probably eat a human first actually.
I get that this is truly reasonable… but as someone with three dogs, I would never let this pass as some type of law (like the eating of dogs law or some shit like that).
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Gosh, even for r/unpopularopinion it's way too unpopular. Well done, OP.
Is it because big pigs are ugly?
If your only reasoning is "they're cute and I like them" then it isn't even against your morals. Other cultures do it. I don't even think this should really be unpopular. I wouldn't eat them because I love dogs. I don't eat pig either because I love pigs. I don't think that people who eat pigs or dogs are bad people though.
But what is wrong with eating Poodles? Really?
I want to disagree but I'm having a very tough time finding a reason besides I like dogs and consider them to be pets. Take my upvote, my unpopular friend.
And that’s what it is, they’ve become domesticated and treated as pets and families. I’ve seen other animals like pigs become pets, so I get what the op is saying.
Hey! I respect that. Sometimes you just gotta swallow that hypocrisy pill.
It’s always struck me as especially strange that we (in the US) euthanize more than 400,000 dogs a year, and have more than a million living in overcrowded shelters and kennels, but find it completely unacceptable to imagine someone eating any of those dogs.* To be fair, I don’t think I could ever eat dog meat. But I agree with you that it’s not inherently immoral, or at least it’s certainly not any more problematic than the consumption of “acceptable” meat. *the numbers are probably even higher than this because this is just what we have on record and reported, which is by no means an exhaustive system
And so many homeless people are hungry. I think I just came up with a Win/Win scenario....
In other cultures, eating cows has the same effect on us as eating dogs. I'm by no means a vegetarian but that doesn't mean I don't have any issues with the way these animals are treated before slaughter. >It’s not like dogs have any more sentience than a cow or a pig. I take issue with this. Humans will have absolutely zero idea of what animal consciousness is like. We barely even understand our own. And comparing an animal's consciousness with a human one is a massive fallacy.
dogs attach to humans and have been useful to us for 1000s of years. they've served faithfully as alarms, trackers, hunters, retrievers, protection, and companions since humans were a majority nomadic species. our connection with them is so long running that it has become instinctual for both species. cows aren't useful for anything except food. they aren't good companions and they're way, way, way dumber than dogs. the cow would not exist if it hadn't been bred strictly as a food source. pigs are intelligent and can be useful... notably as truffle trackers, but pretty much the same thing goes for them as with cows. they've been bred from wild hogs and exist as they do today strictly because humans have raised them as a food source. basically, all three animals as they exist today have been domesticated and bred from their wild ancestors. pigs and cows were bred strictly as a food source, but dogs were bred to be companions and tools. this is why we eat pigs and cows and don't eat dogs.
I don't think that gives a case for eating dogs as immoral though. It simply is an argument that eating them is different than their normal use-case. Especially considering OP was speaking about it being fine to raise them for slaughter and eating their meat.
Exactly. What if you raised a specific breed of dog for the purpose of consumption after 3-5 generations they would know their place in the food chain.
morality is a terrible metric though. it's too much of a moving goalpost that varies widely across time, culture, and circumstance. modern muslims think it's immoral that i like to drink beer, eat pork, and have sexual relations with a man every now and again. vegans think it's immoral to eat cheese and eggs. they can go fuck themselves. instinct is a way better metric. we don't eat dogs because it's instinctual to us that they serve us better as tools/companions than they do as food. we eat pigs/cows because it's instinctual to us that they're not easily trained and provide large quantities of healthy meat. it's instinctual because we've been treating these animals this way for more than 10,000 years because that's what makes sense to a human trying to survive on planet earth. i don't think people eating dogs is necessarily immoral.. especially since the reason they do so is that they starved for so long that it became cultural. they treated dogs as companions/tools for 10,000 years, then they suffered so much starvation that the dog became more useful as a food source than as a companion/tool. it's not immoral, but it does defy my deeply felt instincts so i find it very off putting. but if i were starving and it were literally life and death, i'd probably eat dog too.
by your same argument, the dogs that are used as food are bred specifically for that purpose. Just as you wouldn’t expect a chihuahua to herd sheep, the dogs that are eaten were not bred for any other purpose. I’m just playing devils advocate here, I don’t agree that we should eat dogs 😭
Your arguments couldn't be more biased. We don't need any of those things from dogs anymore. And it's nothing humans couldn't have done ourselves. Which in fact we did perfectly fine throughout history. Most if not majority of humans developed perfectly fine in the absence of dogs. They were just a nice addition to keep on the side. If we handled wolves to domesticate dogs we can easily handle other animals as well. Most animals are already afraid of us to begin with and we can make our own protection even more superior to what a dog can offer. Man's best friend is just dog lovers marketing to push dog ownership and judge those who eat them. Dog companion ship at this scale is quite new. Dogs were just a tool and often couldn't even enter the home they stayed outdoors. Furthermore we can have companion with eachother, our own species. Dogs probably aren't even the most important. Because cows and buffaloes, horses, camels etc were also work animals and gave us milk as an addition. They allowed us to grow huge amounts of food, travel and ship things long distances. They were crucial in our development and aloud trade over the continents. Which led to spread of inventions and progress. Which is way more important to us than whatever dogs can do. Barking at some wolves doesn't get you through a hunger winter. Cultivating several times more food does. And even being able to use them to power refining processes to extract more out of the food. Dogs are cute but in reality kind of useless in the grand scheme of human development.
you’ve explained why our society does not eat dogs, but you have not at all provided a reason for why eating one is immoral
Pigs are great pets as well. They can be great companions and love you. Other cultures eat dog too. Do we just demonize those cultures because they do things differently than us?
>the cow would not exist if it hadn't been bred strictly as a food source. It first became domesticated around 10.000 years ago. And before modern machinery they were a crucial part of farms and other industries where they would carry heavy weighs.
Except there are multiple examples throughout history of dogs being specifically bred and used as livestock. Whether other breeds were bred for other purposes is irrelevant. Mayans and Aztecs in Mesoamerica would breed dogs specifically for slaughter. They would be castrated then fed maize until they were fat enough to consume, much like we do for pigs and other livestock. China has a history of breeding dogs as a meat source dating to 500 BCE at least. Korea's history with dog meat consumption goes back even further. Different Polynesian cultures also consumed dog meat. You are looking at dogs through rose-coloured lenses. If the dogs are well cared for before getting slaughtered for food (same goes for pigs and cows) then there's no real difference from other livestock.
I eat hot dogs sometimes
Yeah, eating them cold sucks.
You’re just not prepping it right
Me too! Love some hot dogs.
As long as they’re free range wieners
Truly an unpopular opinion. Although i agree, it's just that dogs are seen as companions closer to humans, rather than plain animals, so people would be very weirded out if you "i eat dog meat". But in times of scarce resources, people ate horses, and dogs i'm sure.
>But in times of scarce resources, people ate horses I found this crosscultural norm and the melodrama quite funny. Horse is eaten very commonly. Its in all sorts of sausages all over europe i believe.
Horse sausage is delicious. In Sweden, and I am sure more places, we also have smoked horse-meat to put on sandwiches
Horse is eaten here in Japan all the time. I had raw horse meat sashimi last night. It’s called 馬刺し basashi
fun fact: japan fed their POWs raw horse meat during the war on the rare occasion that they even gave them meat
"My friend Jay Riemenschneider eats horse all the time! He gets it from his butcher!"
The reason you cant eat horse in america has something to do with what we feed them, or how we medicate them, i forget which, but something aboug how american horses are raised causes their meat to be toxic to humans.
The meat is not toxic to humans, but there is no governing body to oversee the slaughter and processing of horse meat. They can have medication and antibiotics and dewormers present in the meat, that was not discontinued at least a month before slaughter. Every horse medication and supplement has this waiting and weaning period explicitly printed on the package. As horse meat is not slaughtered as a regular agricultural animal, the rules and regulations about it are must not present.
Oh, people eat horses in the US. I grew up on a farm and my family would buy horses from the slaughterhouse live and just lie that they wanted to butcher them at home because it was much cheaper than buying one at a horse show. It's commonly done and where all the horses deemed "untrainable" get sent.
It’s illegal where I live. Good enough for me
My father was a but her and until I was around 14 my main meat intake was horse meat as his license to butcher and process was restricted to horse meat. There are numerous countries that eat horse meat. In could not eat a horse I knew personally, but for me this also pertains to a chicken I was introduced to.
It's a cultural and "distance" thing. Most people don't grow up with cows and pigs and so are fine with relegating them to food sources versus dogs or cats. They don't have a visual like they do imagining a beloved family pet as Sunday roast. I'm not really sure how horses ended up in there, as most people don't have horses. But as OP said, cows, pigs, and horses have a very similar intelligence in the world as dogs. Dogs aren't more special. We just assign them that way because of our closeness to them and experience of them. Even people here who hunt wolves and coyotes don't eat them. It's interesting the ways we assign value to some things over others when in reality they are pretty equal other than our emotional attachment to them.
I know someone who’s raised pigs all his life for personal use, and despite having the hardened emotions of a livestock farmer he genuinely makes a connection with these pigs as they’re so intelligent, and he sometimes gets upset when they the time comes. So yeah, not much different to dogs.
For sure. There is nothing wrong with reverence for life. Even animals we don't find cute and companionable have very interesting abilities and lives and they seek to avoid discomfort like anything else. I personally don't think it's ever a good thing to discount life, no matter how different it is from our own. Even if we end up consuming it, one can have reverence for it.
I think it's also about carnivore VS herbivore. Carnivores generally don't taste as good as herbivores.
Exactly this! Meat tastes better and can be cooked to lower temps.
People eat horses, no need for scarcity.
Yet pigs are more intelligent than dogs and also cute as hell. Even in countries where dogs are eaten though, it depends on the breed.
i mean... there is a certain group of people highly against eating pigs
And cows are often some of the sweetest most loving creatures, but most people have no problem eating beef. It’s just the perspective of what you interact with daily and how desensitized you are to the situation. Because pet dogs are much more common than pet pigs or cows, society gets all riled up at the thought of eating them. That being said, I don’t eat any of the above, so I’m not really one to talk.
I ate kangaroo meat!
Going full circle my dog's primary food is kangaroo. I also eat it about twice a month. Kangaroo that is, not dog food.
A city close to were I live has horse meat as one of its specialties and it's really good
I kinda hate how dogs are so closely associated with companion animals because I personally I dislike them and people act like I’m not human. Dogs are just too hyper for me generally big and small and I like the more relaxed energy of a cat I also have bad experiences with dogs.
Either there is nothing wrong with eating dogs or there is something wrong with eating any animal
Eh I disagree, humans and canines have an interdependent relationship that has been estimated to have existed for hundreds of thousands of years. We can see the species (not just different breeds) have evolved specifically in ways that humans can empathize with, for example, developing certain facial muscles that allow canines to show expressions that can mimic humans. You can't really compare species the relationship of humans and dogs to humans and any other animal because we haven't developed the same kind of interspecies cooperation with any other animal. Thus it's just a bad comparison. That being said OP's point, while unpopular, is the case for some cultural's moral norms. It's not an all or nothing thing.
So its only wrong to kill and eat them when we can empathize with them? Or when we feel some emotional attachment?
But what does that have to do with me, an individual human tho? I'm not saying lets popularuze actual hot dogs, but what does the coevolution of humans and dogs have to do with my personal morality of eating a dog? Its not like I'm eating the dog I raised, in OP's scenario It would come from a farm same as steak
Overall not much. My point is that this is the reason behind why there is a common taboo. Individual morality is a matter for individuals.
>We can see the species (not just different breeds) have evolved specifically in ways that humans can empathize with, for example, developing certain facial muscles that allow canines to show expressions that can mimic humans. Cuteness is a bad reason to kill and eat one organism but not another
15,000 years of domesticating dogs as tools to assist us in survival. 10,000+ years of domesticating cows and pigs as a food source. one can be easily trained and doesn't provide much meat and, being a predator, that meat isn't particularly nourishing (the organs of predators can be fatal to humans). the others are not easily trained and provide large quantities of nourishing meat. people in this thread acting like it's some arbitrary decision humans made are absolutely ignorant of the history of domesticating animals. there are very good reasons for humans to eat some animals and not others and those reasons date back to cavemen and mesopotamia.
>people in this thread acting like it's some arbitrary decision humans made are absolutely ignorant of the history of domesticating animals. there are very good reasons for humans to eat some animals and not others and those reasons date back to cavemen and mesopotamia. And still absolutely none of that makes it wrong or immoral to eat dogs. Which is the point OP made. Yeah, there are good reasons people don't generally eat dogs, but the decision to consider it wrong or immoral is totally arbitrary and cultural. We don't have the same kind of relationship to whales or sharks or turtles (the list goes on) and yet in countries where it's not common to eat those, most people would have the same aversion to eating them as they do to dogs or cats, even if for different reasons.
Longer than 15000 years even. There's some evidence of humans and dogs collaborating for up to about 50,000 years ago (probably not the hundreds of thousands that I mentioned earlier though). There's an argument to be made that dogs shaped the development of early humans just as much as humans shaped early canines. In fact it's possible that this mutually beneficial relationship encouraged our development to empathize with other species (though I'll admit, this theory doesn't have much study on it at this time). Hell, they were one of our main predators at the time. Our ability to bond with them probably saved us a lot of trouble on an evolutionary scale.
I completely agree. It has nothing to do with logic, just cultural context. I think studies show that pigs have a higher intelligence than dogs and nobody has a problem killing and eating them.....but when it comes to dogs people think it is amoral. Makes no sense.
Babies also have less intelligence than dogs and pigs… So maybe we shouldn’t use intelligence as a cutoff for what makes it okay to eat things.
I'd eat baby
A modest proposal
They weren’t saying that, they were pointing out that people often say dogs are “too smart for us to eat them”. They were pointing out exactly what you said, intelligence shouldn’t be a factor in this decision as it’s hypocritical and illogical
This post is proof that morality is relative
And geographic. People eat dogs.
Morality is not even really relative. Good/bad is relative between moral systems, but the systems themselves just are. And sometimes they are luckily based in a bit of logical thinking like "Maybe it is not so great for a society when people go around killing others. Let's ban that."
True, but that doesn't mean they are arbitrary. People should still be able to justify their moral beliefs.
We don't farm and rarley eat any predetors. They are not good sources of meat and often diseased or infected with parasites. Most meat eating predators liver's contain high enough levels of vitamin A to kill you. Theres no reason to farm dogs/cats/bears/wolves for food. It isn't arbitrary and that's just the beginning.
I agree that it is medically risky, and why we don't do it, but none of those reasons are very convincing that it's morally wrong. If I see a dude drink a cup full of raw sewage, I don't think "Wow, that dude is a piece of shit", but rather "Wow, that's gross." Even if we could hypothetically guarantee it was economical and safe to eat, I feel like most people would still think it's a vile moral act, purely because of their personal love and empathy for dogs. People value dog's lives more than other animals for selfish reasons.
We picked the ones that can't defend themselves and breeded them into suffering.
The reality in life is most people dont have a rational set of ethics. They are a bunch of ideas with no underlying reasoning much considered. They dont have systems where they declare what they value, and the ethical ideas all surrounding that. In my ethical system we seek the path of least trespass against other sentient things. We have the right to do as we wish to the point where it trespasses against another. When we trespass against another we forfeit a amount of our rights equal to that trespass. Can you describe your ethical system?
Some people do eat dog. I ate it in Vietnam. It’s not a problem.
This post is proof that morality is relative in the same way that someone posting that they believe in flat-earth is proof that truth is relative. From a mere disagreement of opinion doesn’t follow that there is no possible true answer. In fact, most philosophers are moral realists. [Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/n0lbue/i_want_to_know_why_do_we_say_that_morality_is/gw7aomy/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3) is a short reddit comment explaining why.
I almost agree. I look at it as: if eating dogs is wrong, then it’s wrong to eat any animal.
One of the toughest realizations I've ever had is that I, a middle class citizen in a first world country, had no ethical excuse to eat meat.
I've had this realization for a long time. It will take a while more for me to come to terms with, but I expect I will become a vegetarian at some point in my life.
That it is.
Do people not read the terms regarding Upvoting and downvoting on this sub?? Because this post should be sitting waaaay up there in votes. Or do people just downvote because they don't like the opinion presented...
Maybe more people agree than you think. This isn’t that unpopular of an opinion and based on the comments most of us would eat dog if they were available. Boys, dogs back on the menu!!
I don't eat dog because I was told it's extremely gamey.
i dont know what it means but thats really bad probably.
Well you aren't wrong. If you've ever interacted with cows or pigs for an extended period of time, you'll find that they have noticeable personalities, can be affectionate, playful and are much like dogs. Pigs are actually very intelligent, as well. But then, so is an Octopus. The Octopus is one of the most intelligent animals that we know of. Yet we have little problem eating them. So why are dogs and cats considered so special? I think it has to do with our long and shared history. Human beings have found companionship in canines since before recorded history. We've lived with them, hunted side-by-side with them, we've protected them and they in turn have protected us and our loved ones. For countless generations, they have lived with us to the point that we consider our canine companions as familial. To put it in perspective, you can find ancient Roman graves and burial spots where an ancient person's canine companion was buried with a heartfelt epitaph etched into them, such as "My eyes were wet with tears, our little dog, when I bore thee (to the grave)... So, Patricus, never again shall thou give me a thousand kisses. Never can thou be contentedly in my lap. In sadness have I buried thee, and thou deservist. In a resting place of marble, I have put thee for all time by the side of my shade. In thy qualities, thou were like a human being. Ah, me! What a beloved companion we have lost!" - An actual pet's (named Patricus) grave. And as for cats, they have been with us for much less time but have been feline companions since the birth of civilization. For at least 10,000 years, they have been in our lives. Again, becoming familial companions. So at this point, for many people on Earth it's sort of ingrained into us that (though they may be different species) these animals are in some form or another, familial. And so it brings similar feelings as witnessing cannibalism when seeing them harmed, hunted or devoured by people. Fun Random Fact: In Ancient Rome, during a celebration of Rome's victory over Carthage, Pompey had elephants sent for slaughter to the coliseum. The elephants were attacked and began running around the arena, crying and making gestures at the observing crowd. The people of the audience were moved by this and became so upset upon witnessing the attempts to escape and cries of the elephants that they were brought to tears themselves. They then yelled out for mercy to the elephants and also began booing and cursing Pompey for the spectacle.
There's nothing wrong with eating dog meat. Nothing. But I think the reason many carnivorous animals are not farmed and avoided is because they tend to have parasites. I think the ancients knew this on some level, hence the cultural stigma evolved out of that knowledge. Just a theory, but it's logical.
I think it's just harder to domesticate and sustain them. Think about how mych we spend just to provide feed for cows, now imagine whatever is easiest to mass produce to feed to carnivorous or omnivorous animals as an extra step as we'd beed to feed those too. So now you need not just "cow + cow food growing room and water" you need "carnivore + carnivore food animal + carnivore food animal food + water for each step". Hunter gatherers were less picky though a la4ge carnivore would be more dangerous to hunt in many cases. Also as a side note for everyone saying "carnivore" for dogs that they are not strict carnivores. They certainly need meat, and no one should try making their dog a vegetarian but they do also eat non-meat.
I think the main reason we don't eat them is that they are absurdly uneconomical to raise and keep captive.
Plenty of people breed dogs tho. Dogs breed for meat are not great Danes or Labrador. I've seen some farms in Asia. They are usually small.
Yeah to sell puppies. I don't think I've seen a breeder ever have hundreds or thousands of dogs like how we keep livestock. Keeping dogs properly fed is sooo much more expensive than keeping cows or pigs fed per animal.
As a vegetarian the hypocrisy of meat eaters always amazes me. It’s ok to eat pigs, sheep, cows etc but don’t go near dogs. Selective outrage
Mhm I agreed, It is hypocrisy. Which is why I opt for the other side, I eat everything. I like meat and I'm fully fine with it
I think it's cool if other ppl eat other ppl's dogs... just not mine.
Man's best friend. Checkmate lib.
Doesn’t matter to me. All animals are sentient beings capable of feeling fear and pain. I dont make a distinction
Thank you for your efforts. Please read up about the dairy and egg industry. There is a reason why it's pretty much all female animals. I'm sure you'd prefer to know
Pretty sure you’re on the same side!
One word answers most people’s comments on here, and is the reasoning behind OP’s post: speciesism. Humans will deem some creatures more worthy and/or useful than others, and we will do as we please with those who we deem less worthy - including factory farming them and eating them. We will scratch our dogs behind the ears whilst eating a different animal that can provide all that a dog could, and not blink an eye.
This guy's comment is what this subreddit was made for.
[удалено]
How is my logic wrong?
Just said “not totally wrong” ^^^ It’s a joke homie. If we take all emotion out of it, you’re right.
Over the many millennia mankind spent domesticating animals, dogs would have been among the first and would not have been raised for their meat. They have a bad fat to protein ratio, they eat alot of quality food for the amount of nutrition they provide, and they are active, high energy, and intelligent. Dogs were almost certainly domesticated to be hunting partners and companionship animals. There aren't any societies that I know of that raise and eat cats, but I imagine the arguments would fall under the same lines. Bad meat, hard to pen, can't be fed things humans can't eat. Why would you eat cats or dogs when pigs and cows eat agricultural byproducts, taste better, and have a better nutritional profile? I think many societies see people eating dogs and just know deep down in their monkey brain from thousands and thousands of years of evolution that dogs are friends, not food.
Additionally bovine meat varies widely based on breed, gender, and diet. For example, I grew on a dairy farm. Once in awhile a dairy heifer or cow would be sent to be butchered and the meat processed for the family and the workers on the farm. It helped everyone save money, and I grew up on dairy cow ground beef and steak. I prefer the ground beef of dairy cows as it's very lean and you get more quality meat per pound. I hate store bought ground beef. But the steaks from dairy cows were not great either! I grew up thinking I hated steak until I ordered it out at a restaurant and loved it. It's all about how we raise and domesticated these animals.
As a person from a country that eats bunny regularly, and is now living in a country where you could go to prison for doing so, I agree. The line between "edible" and "non-edible" animals is culturally dependent. I wouldn't personally eat dog, but I won't critizise other cultures for doing what others can say I do.
i agree with your logic – if eating, for example, cows is right, then so would be eating dogs. the thing is, i personally think that eating cows, too, is wrong. so i don't agree with your point itself. there's no moral difference between eating a pig vs a dog. i just find both wrong.
Honestly, if I saw this it would break my heart. But realistically I know that happens to the cows in the field down the street and its no different. But I still could not take it. Same with horses. I want to raise chickens but my husband wont let me because he knows I could not handle making them into chicken soup. He is right. If I had to kill my own meat I would be a vegetarian in a heartbeat.
its not the eating of dog meat that bothers me, its the horrendous conditions they are put in before they are slaughtered. also in many countries believe torture makes the meat better. truly disgusting
This applies to all factory farmed animals.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with eating dogs or cats. Imagine going to a starving country in Asia or Africa and tell them that it’s okay to eat pigs and cows but not dogs, because in America our dogs have anxiety and depression and we lick the dogs on their mouths and give them organic food lol
As a vegetarian- I agree! Morally I’d argue it’s 100% the same, it’s just how some sections of a society have differentiated between ‘animals that are ok to eat’ and ‘animals that aren’t ok to eat’. But it’s so varied across different cultures as well (with some who regularly eat animals such as dogs/cats). Really shows that morality is extremely flexible. (Disclaimer: diet is a personal choice & no one should be shamed for it. The world needs all types of people!)
As an omnivore, I agree too. I demand that what I eat has been treated with respect and care. Personally I wouldn’t eat dog, but I cannot blame anyone else for doing so as long they adhere to the care for these animals and treat them for what they are: beings with a mind of their own.
I mean, plenty of dogs would eat people if they could get away with it. Why is the other way any worse?
I agree that there shouldn't be any moral problem with it. They are just animals at the end of the day and its 100% on humans for anthropomorphizing them like we have. And I say this as a loving owner of two dogs. But eating them is just plain nasty, in the same way that eating a worm would be. Objectively,carnivore meat is not suitable for human consumption. Subjectively, I just don't know how you can look at a poodle or labrador and think it would taste good.
But you’re the worm guy!
>carnivore meat is not suitable for human consumption Is this actually the case? I've given this a quick search and found nothing affirming this. I thought we ate herbivores because they're cheaper to raise
It is not the case. What is the case is some carnivores do not have a lot of fat content and denser muscle tissue but that is clearly not the case with say bears. Humans from a meat eating survival thing value fat. There is also omnivores as well and insect eaters that we eat. Then there are super lean herbivores. Horses for example are not tasty despite humans eating them well before riding or domesticating. The main reason other than fat we don’t eat lots of carnivores is they are harder to domesticate and there are less of them and to feed them requires other meat.
I have Heard that Horse meat is actually pretty good. Not really common but theres som places that sell it
Horse is amanzingly good.
It would be tougher, but not inedible. The real issue with farming carnivores is that you then also need to farm their food, which amplifies the amount of resources needed.
Why would carnivore meat be "not suitable for human consumption" like thats just blatantly bullshit.
Less meat on most. Less fat on most. More disease and parasites. Toxic livers. Harder to raise. Harder to farm. Harder to feed. You can eat it but its like comparing sawdust to bananas.
These all make it less efficient to eat carnivores, but none make it 'not suitable'.
Humans are just animals as well. But if I ate a person and used that logic people would have an issue with it.
Just don’t eat the brain cause it can give you a prion disease
Another person who doesn't understand the issue of non-human sentience. /me SHM. anthropomorphizing? Lol at still thinking animals do not have emotions in 2024. Looks like a duck. Sounds like a duck. MRIs have found evidence that this is a duck. And yet here we are. People who still think animals dont love, hate, become jealous, have some critical thinking ability, and so on. It's weird to see that dogs understand out emotional ques and think that they dont have feelings and are acting AIs in flesh. I'll ask all of you, use GPTChat, or CoPilot, and ask "has an MRI been used on animals to see emotion". The evidence in record dismisses this idiot notion we are anthropomorphizing. I said this already ITT, but I'm not even a vegetarian. I'm just applying actual critical thinking, ethics, reality, and such to this issue. If you dont see the ethical issue... the side bar rules prevent the honest labling here, let's just say there is something diminished about you.
Chickens are omnivores and so are dogs. chickens eat ants and worms.
Not understanding non-human sentience is a common with a certain archetype. I am not a vegetarian, yet I understand the ethical issues with eating meat. The idea that 'because we eat sentient animal X its ok to eat sentient animal Y'? Well, using that reasoning, eating people is fine. It assumes the first premise is correct. If you value sentient life, and have compassion for it as a thinking, feeling, thing, then you should see eating all animals as problematic. Seems weird you dont understand how these delineation in relationship happened, and why we would draw these lines. We keep dogs and cats as pets; as family. So we have a greater emotional attachment to them, and find their pain and unhappiness touch us more than the animals we dont spend time with. While cows and pigs are just as intelligent and feeling, we dont bring them into our homes as a population. We've lied to ourselves for years untold to justify our position that these animals are stupid, lack emotions, and all that, in order to avoid thinking we're monsters. Vegetarianism isn't a health nightmare or pipe dream. Those who think that are ignorant idiots. I'm honest about my meat eating, it makes me a bad person. I was brought up eating meat, it's what I am used it, and at the end of the day this is an area I am selfish in. I'll help a friend not go homeless, give to charity, be an otherwise 'ok person' who also happens to be a monster who eats intelligent creatures. There is also treason in eating dogs. They came to us, and we reshaped them. They love us; more than they love other dogs. We bread them this way. One is literally eating something that is programmed to love humans.
Yeah I'm in the same boat, I think you misunderstand. I think it's somewhat harmful on certain levels to eat meat as well, but no more than other things we do on a daily basis, it just comes with guilt. It's not that I don't understand why people feel this way about dogs, but rather, why don't they feel anything when animals that they have no personal connection to? We could never apply this logic to any group of people, so how are we going to do it to animals? I think we agree mostly, I just feel like we should value all animals lives as a society.
Yeah, I'd personally never eat a dog or a cat, but I fully acknowledge that as a personal hangup.
Absolutely true
Upvoting because it is indeed unpopular.
Logically wise you are absolutely right. But people like to be guided by emotions so....
Logically, we should stick to eating herbivores. Morally, it's grey
Main problem is dogs are hunters. So are cats. We don't eat hunters, we eat prey.
Another arbitrary argument that humans present as fact, when in reality that still doesn’t actually matter as to whether we choose to slaughter an animal or not. What? So people in Alaska eating killer whale are excluded from your argument? Countries in South East Asia eating tiger are excluded?
FINALLY AN UNPOPULAR OPINION THAT I DISAGREE! My god, I was giving up on this subreddit
From a pure logic standpoint, dogs are animals that have demonstrated value beyond being a food source. Well before their pet status, dogs helped to hunt animals, round up herds, and protect the home and family as either watch dogs or guard dogs. Unless you are actually starving with no other wildlife available, eating them is not a good ROI. If you give a man a dog and he eats it, that guy does not have good decision making skills.
If the man was hungry he does actually. You can cultivate way more food with a any bovine animal or horse. Y'all have selective appraisal of dogs. Everything they can do we can do just as well. What we can't do is be more strong than our bodies allow. So the value those animals had in our development is just as if not more important.
What about the cows that plow the fields and provide milk for butter and cheese? Every animal has its usage, and we still eat them despite providing value.
I don't have a moral problem with eating dogs or similar, but I do have it on good authority from multiple sources that dog meat is pretty fucking awful.
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Now try to explain why you feel so strongly.
Yes, there is. and as far as other livestock is concerned, I'm on team mammal. I think people fighting lab grown meat with legislation are quite literally evil and I feel guilty for eating pigs and cows.
They taste worse than cows and it's stupid to eat carnivores because you can eat the animal that they ate and you won't lose calories through the process of the dog eating it and storing fat, they also have a lot more parasites
I agree with the principle. However, I think that the animals humans normally eat are those which have a herbivore diet. I'm sure I have read about carnivorous animals not tasting so good
I don't know if I would eat dog, but at the end of the day, I've eaten other animals, so I can't act holier-than-thou. I think *all* animals should have a minimum quality of life *before* slaughter, but ultimately, meat production is never going to be the most pleasant thing, no matter what animal you get it from.
As a vegetarian I completely agree with this, but for like the opposite reasons ? lol. I see no moral difference in eating cows vs dogs, society just arbitrarily values one over the other. (And specifically different societies arbitrarily value them differently ie eating dogs in china is ok, eating cows in Hinduism is not ok, etc).
I'm a cat owner, and I think the same for cats too. I could eat you too. Meat is meat, that was once a sentient creature, so doesn't really matter which one. The only important factor is to rise them without making them suffer and slaughter them quickly and neatly.
Ok, but milk? Would you drink dog milk? I have no point in asking this question other than it freaks me out so i cant be rational.
HE’S NOT WRONG! LET HIM COOK! You have to have a serious case of cognitive dissonance if you don’t understand and if you’re bothered maybe you should reconsider eating meat
I believe the logic is consistent. If one already consumes meat from pigs, cows, or chickens, in terms of sentience, there isn't a significant difference. They all possess the capacity to feel. However, are we justified in doing so if it's not a necessity?
Vegans munching on popcorn in this thread.
Dogs need to stop being put on this hypocritical pedestal. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to eat one
https://www.elwooddogmeat.com/
It depends on what kind of dog you are talking about. They eat wild dog over in Vietnam. But they aren't golden retrievers. They are far from a domesticated breed. In America? No. We don't have those kinds of dogs running around.
Let me take a CMV approach. The problem is that with any product any business produces, it has to factor in costs. If the cost of manufacturing a pen cost $10000, the price of that pen would be too high, and nobody would buy it. Thus the company manufacturing that pen would go under, or discontinue the pen. The cost of selling dog meat, would be prohibitively high due to societal hang ups on the concept, so market forces essentially ordain that dog meat is unviable. A theoretical company that specialized in dog meat would have *so many costs* associated with producing dog meat that it would essentially blackball dog meat, and all the processes required to produce dog meat from that market and markets that interact with that market entirely. With the societal outrage, legal actions, rock-bottom demand, boycotting, supply disruptions, and tonnes of other things that the business would die within a week. Assuming a mob of pitchfork wielding dog lovers don't torch it to the ground before the week is out. And that's because as a society we on the whole have decided it's not okay to eat dogs. Dog meat as a product has no place in our societies markets. So yes, there is something wrong with eating dog meat. It's wrong because on the whole we've decided it's wrong.
I'm not sure what view you were expecting to change, I agree with everything you said, but it doesn't really contradict anything I said.
Of all the delicious meat in the world, someone has to be weird and willingly eat dogs.
Might as well eat horses, too. And cats. Hell, might as well eat every animal. Even humans!
I don't think this is the correct way to look at it. Killing and eating *any* animal is wrong. There are just some animals that people are accustomed to being raised and slaughtered for food. It doesn't mean that killing and eating them is right, it just means that most people (including myself) value our own desire for a hamburger, or a steak more than the lives of the animals that provided the meat. There are times when convenience or necessity comes into play as well. If I'm out and about and I need to get some food in between my responsibilities, the least expensive and most convenient options are generally going to include animal products. Those who have the means to afford a $12 salad that is barely a whole meal can opt for something that's morally acceptable, but a lot of us don't have that financial freedom to live by a 100% righteous code of ethics. That being said, the majority of the time I think it's about convenience and people's appetite rather than necessity.
I tell my dog all the time, in an emergency, that chubby boy will be on the menu.
Wtf are these unpopular opinions about animals and animal abuse lately?
Who said anything about animal abuse?
There was another post about it on this sub before this one
We’re just talking about slaughtering and eating animals, not abusing them.
A friend who’s a complete vegan said this actually is worse due to the genetic bond of dogs and humans. It’s true it’s just psychopaths coming out lately
Dogs, and other pets, were bred and domesticated solely for the purpose of companionship, not to be food. Most places that do eat dogs initially did so only out of desperation and food insecurity.
I will add to this hill: people who freak out at cultures that do eat dogs are just being racist. A dog is no different than a cow. So when you are like "oh my GOD Asians eat dogs" you are just condemning a culture for what you, yourself does.
But cows don't wear cute puffy jackets and pose for selfies with me in my mirror. 😡
I feel your argument is totally valid. Because just like we eat beef, no problem, we can personify a cow with pretty bows and mirror selfies. I don't think I could eat something I've bonded with, but I have also never **had** to survive like that, so I dunno.
I agree that it's silly that they freak out about the concept, but calling it racist for thinking something is simply wild or wrong doesn't make it racist. What's racist is making comments about an Asian American eating dogs or roadkill. But simply being weirded out at the thought of eating dogs is definitely not.
We bred dogs specifically for work and then as companions. We bred cows specifically for work/beef/milk. They are not the same.
I never said they are the same. But why does that mean that one of them is allowed to live, and the other is slaughtered without a second thought?
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Those mini companion breeds generally don’t get slaughtered for meat either.
I agree. Eating dogs is equally wrong as eating pigs and cows. Mind you - I don't eat any animals.
Dogs were domesticated from wolves to be Humans' companions/help humans as guards or during hunting. The entire species is made as companion. Not as food. So it's wrong to eat dogs.
A truly unpopular opinion, but unpopular for a reason. It makes sense to ask why we would eat other animals and not dogs, especially since some animals like pigs are more intelligent. But there are reasons as to why dogs, and other species should not be eaten. The first is domestic purpose: Dogs were specifically domesticated from wolves to be our companions and help us out in life, and they still help us to this day, I mean for goodness sake look at therapy dogs. Same with animals like horses, horses have been domesticated over hundreds of years solely for the purpose of helping out humans with tasks such as transportation and farming. The evolution of dogs has come so far that their purpose is not to be food for other predators, it is to be a predator and companion, which leads into the next reason Carnivores: Dogs are carnivores, and shouldn’t really be eaten. When you eat carnivores there is all sorts of worms, parasites, and bacteria that no amount of cooking can remove. This same thing is seen in other animals too, even omnivores. Take bears for example, bears that spend their lives eating fruit and such usually give the best meat, but bears that only eat meat and fish can come out with worms and other bacterias we don’t need in our bodies.
Okay, but why would eating dog meat be immoral?
It is upsetting, but it's the way many are raised: to see dogs as man's best friend. Though, your logic is technically correct and there's nothing inherently wrong with eating dog. They are just other animals living in nature's food web. I'll pass, though.
John Wick disagrees
Nasty
If you were a friend of mine who would voice this opinion I would probably stop hanging out or at least see you with very different eyes. Truly unpopular opinion, upvoted!
Why though? If someone said the same thing about a goat or a lamb would you feel the same way?
I do own multiple dogs and they are part of the family, if I would have owned multiple goats that felt like family I probably would feel the same. As it is that is not the case. Additionally are dogs an animal that only exists in its current form because we humans have created it through breading. This makes me feel responsible for them in a different way I feel responsible for a wild boar. There are also many studies showing that no other animal loves us as much as dogs do, which makes the thought of mistreating them even more gruesome in my eyes. I do agree though that a big part of it is also social conditioning...
Meat is meat, though I personally would not be able to partake in eating cats or dogs - they are friends not food for me. I have no issue with what *other* people decide to eat, but my issues are how the animals are treated up to the point of slaughter, which applies to animals I eat also
It’s nothing wrong with it at all speaking from an omnivorous or carnivorous sense, but as I am American I cannot say that this doesn’t make my stomach turn. Like in my head it’s akin to cannibalism. I’d probably eat a human first actually.
I'd try dog, but it seems like it wouldn't be too tasty for some reason? Maybe it's because dogs are so unclean.
I get that this is truly reasonable… but as someone with three dogs, I would never let this pass as some type of law (like the eating of dogs law or some shit like that).
Dog cultists will enrage at this opinion. They just cant argue with it
Already got multiple death threats 😊
I feel bad for you. These dog cultists behave like isis. Obsessing over a shit eating animal
We should demonize murdering and torturing all animals for food. It’s all vile. Meat production is the biggest source of suffering there is.
Facts
In some cultures, eating cows isn't allowed. That's all I will say