Let them eat dog

Does anyone really care that man's best friend became man's main course?

The SPCA wants to educate certain communities that eating cats and dogs is unacceptable in New Zealand.

It follows a Tongan family cooking up their pet dog to eat, because they wanted to get rid of it.

SPCA chief executive Robyn Kippenberger says the eating of cats and dogs is also known to happen in Vietnamese and Chinese cultures.

"We want to talk to the Tongans, but also we need to be aware that there are other communities where that's culturally acceptable. So we need to actually educate them as well, that this is not our culture." (1)

Of course it isn't "our culture." Our culture is hunting pigs, terrorising them with dogs, and slaughtering them with knives, blasting ducks out of the air, dragging fish out of water on the end of a hook, bobby calves, sow crates and farrowing stalls, battery hens and 'free range' barns where the hens are crushed so close they are driven insane.

And that's before we start on how we treat each other ...

So let him eat his fucking dog, unless we're going to address our own rank hypocrisy. Perhaps that's what the SPCA should be educating people about, because the cruelty of what might be called "New Zealand culture" far surpasses one idosyncratic chap whacking his mutt on the head and sticking it on the barbeque.

1 - "Eating cats and dogs "not NZ culture"," unattributed news report by NewstalkZB, 17th of August, 2009. (http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/newsdetail1.asp?storyID=161747)