A friend and co-worker, Sam, has started up a blog. Link HERE
Like me, Sam has spent time living in both Cambodia and Vietnam. He's currently in the Vietnamese Countryside, and has been blogging about life out there.
Of particular interest is his post:
The Death of a Puppy and the Fallacy of Moral Equivalence
...which combines a personal story about dog thieves in Vietnam with an opinion piece on why it's wrong to eat dog meat.
For a counterpoint, a Vietnamese writer recently defended eating dog meat in one of the English speaking magazines in Vietnam:
Telling Vietnamese to stop eating dog meat is barking up wrong tree: In Vietnam, dog meat is the norm
He basically says: "Foreigners are hypocritical for criticizing Vietnamese for eating dog meat. You should either put up with it, and accept that it's the custom here, or go back home."
The latter article was posted to the Expats in Ho Chi Minh City Facebook page, where people argued about it endlessly in the comments thread. (As I mentioned before, this Facebook page attracts people who just want to argue.)
Many people argued that eating dogs was no different than eating other animals. Many people argued that eating dogs was morally wrong because dogs are man's best friend.
My own bias is as follows:
Dogs are not like chickens. Anyone who has ever owned a dog knows that they are capable of showing humans a level of affection, and a level of loyalty, that cows and chickens do not.
I read on the Internet years ago that the domestication of dogs happened because some wolves started hanging around human tribes. Humans would give them the leftover bones from the meat. In return, the wolves started helping them hunt. Pretty soon, the wolves trusted the humans enough to leave their puppies with the humans while they went out to hunt.
To then kill and eat dogs now seems like a violation of this trust.
To then kill and eat dogs now seems like a violation of this trust.
(My friend Sam makes exactly the same points in his blog post, but I'm also claiming them as my own because I've been using these same talking points for years during various "bar stool" debates about eating dogs.)
All that being said, this is one of the issues I do kind of go back and forth on depending on what mood you catch me in. There are days when I'm close to agreeing with people who say that there's no moral distinction between different types of animal meat.
All that being said, this is one of the issues I do kind of go back and forth on depending on what mood you catch me in. There are days when I'm close to agreeing with people who say that there's no moral distinction between different types of animal meat.
But most days, I'm anti-dog meat. For the reasons mentioned above.
2 comments:
Bên nào nghe cũng thấy ngứa mắt. Các bạn chó quyền cứ suốt ngày lôi invectives ra để xỉ vả người ăn thịt cầy, nghe như thể các bạn ta đây đạo đức sáng ngời lắm - cứ mở mấy article wiki các bạn viết là muốn đấm thẳng vào mặt. Các bạn ăn thịt cầy thì rất thích lý sự cùn (ngồi vây quanh là echo chamber chắc tưởng mình lý lắm), đến thú nuôi của anh em họ hàng gia đình còn đem đi làm thịt được, cái món bị thế giới nó sỉ vả lên án lại còn thích ép người khác phải ăn cho bằng được.
Xét sau cùng thì dẹp ba cái món này vẫn là hay nhất. Vì chính bản thân người Việt cũng coi chó là thú nuôi chứ có riêng gì người nước ngoài đâu. Các bạn ăn thịt cầy hay dùng lý là các bạn không mần chó của mình, nhưng khi nuôi các bạn cũng xích hay nhét vô chuồng đấy thôi, các bạn nuôi chó cũng để canh nhà chứ có phải ẵm làm thú cưng gì đâu. Dẹp cái món khoái khẩu thì cũng là bớt đi vài nỗi lo phải đi thay một con camera 4 chân mới. Bớt móc cái lý "chó xổng ngoài đường không bưng về ăn thì để làm gì?". Bớt thấy dân tình combat ngoài đường như phim xã hội đen Hồng Kông hay Tam Quốc Diễn Nghĩa. Bớt vài miếng dồi chó thì buồn, mà quên sự tồn tại của món ăn rồi thì ai còn phiền não gì nữa. Bớt ba cái tánh man rợ cũng là mở đường cho dân tình chăm sóc cho thú nuôi đàng hoàng. Cơ mà bảo dân nghèo nuôi thú cũng khó.
Kết luận: chó quyền với thịt cầy quyền chúng ló thích làm gì cũng được - cứ choảng nhau một trận cho khỏe rồi lấy kết quả phân định có được ăn hay không. Cơ mà làm gì thì làm đừng có reo réo trên internet của bố.
To reflect upon why I don't feel any deep need to side with the puppy rights crowd, even though on the apparent I should, is to realize how both sides are just equally crude. It's impossible to hear a single argument that doesn't reduce itself to "I hate/love dog meats because that's how I feel". People are free to heap upon themselves the label of being civilized and all that self-congratulatory terms like wearing some fancy coat, how does that distinguish their conducts from classifiable animal behavior categories is something they can only tell themselves.
But well, ultimately, reality will always be the one who determines all this stuff. If something were truly that unnatural, people would stop seeing it at some point. Reality doesn't care about facts, feelings, and how loud-mouthed some people could be (thinking of this really makes me jealous of the Japanese who in some many ways truly live in the best country in the world).
I'm sure I would be more than happy to see the sight of the benevolent civilized people starving themselves to death in a scenario which involves dogs being the only food source - to uphold your own values regardless reality (even at the cost of erasing your own existences) is always heroic and laudatory, and to try to impose upon the defiance toward the force of reality is to be an inferior man.
But well... humans are just like dogs, a category of animals, anyway. If people were truly contented with being on the same hierarchy with the dogs, nobody would have composed endless number of canons and sacred texts to fictionalize their own jealousy toward some higher existence entity for thousand of years.
Post a Comment