If you’re following the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics on Twitter, you can’t avoid the tweets on calls to boycott the 2018 Winter Games in support of a ban on the eating of dog meat in Korea. Certainly, as 2018 just happens to be The Year of the Dog in the Asian zodiac timeframe, and the Winter Olympics are in South Korea this year, this is an opportune time to protest the consumption of dog meat.

Over the past two millenia, gaegogi, or dog meat, has been consumed in Korea, as well as China and Vietnam. Wikipedia cites an article that states 25 million dogs are eaten each year by humans. I have never tried dog meat, or cat meat for that matter, which is also consumed by humans to lesser degrees, primarily in Asia.

But I have had horse meat, a popular delicacy in Japan. It’s called basashi, served raw like sashimi, and it is delicious. But friends who had never in their life had the thought of eating horse would probably outwardly protest, or inwardly recoil upon hearing that horse was a highlight of Japanese cuisine.

There are quite a few commentaries on the internet on this topic – the idea that eating animals viewed first as pets and friends is abhorrent, while eating animals viewed first as food is not even a passing thought for most people (vegans and animal activists excluded).

Why is that? Jared Piazza, a lecturer in moral psychology from Lancaster University commented about the terrible ways dogs are slaughtered for human consumption, and the ambivalence it creates in many:

I too find myself heartbroken by these images. But as a vegan I find myself wondering why isn’t there more outrage in the world over the slaughter of other animals. For instance, each year in the US roughly 110m pigs are killed for meat. Where is the same public outcry over bacon?

The simple answer is emotional prejudice. We just don’t care enough about pigs for their needless suffering to pull at our heartstrings. As Melanie Joy, social psychologist and expert on “carnism” points out, we love dogs, yet we eat pigs, and there are simply no good moral reasons for such hypocrisy.

However this belief really just reflects the fact that people spend more time getting to know dogs than pigs. Many people have dogs as pets and through this relationship with dogs we’ve come to learn about them and care deeply for them. But are dogs really that different from other animals we eat?

Dr. Marc Bekoff wrote in Psychology Today explained that our feelings towards animals slaughtered so they can become pork chops or hamburger or chicken soup are muted since these animals are “out of sight, out of mind” for many of us.

In my essay concerning eating pigs I wrote, “When some people learn that I go to China to work with Animals Asia in their moon bear rescue program (link is external) (see also) they ask, ‘How can you go there, that’s where they eat dogs and cats?’ I simply say that I just left the United States where people routinely eat pigs, cows, chickens, and millions of other sentient beings.” Why is eating dogs different from eating cows and pigs at a barbecue or in a restaurant? For one, we don’t see the actual painful process of how pigs and cows become meals. 

In the end, is the debate about whether people eat dog or cat meat? Or is it about whether we care how we treat animals raised for human consumption? Do many of us prefer to keep such images out of sight, out of mind? (Yes, I struggle with the non-committal nature of this post’s conclusion.)