Posted on 12/31/2012 3:58:52 AM PST by Daffynition
Eating Fido - or Tiddles - might be more commonly associated with China and Vietnam, but rustling up a slice of cured dog meat to enjoy as a snack is not unusual in rural areas of central and eastern Switzerland, Tages Anzeiger claims.
There are no statistics on the number of dogs and cats killed every year in Switzerland and social disapproval of dog-eating means the practice is shrouded in secrecy. No commercial abattoirs slaughter dogs or cats, but farmers in the Appenzell and St Gallen cantons in German-speaking Switzerland often slaughter the animals themselves.
The most popular breed of dog for eating is a close relative of the Rottweiler.
"There's nothing odd about it", one farmer in the Rhine Valley said. "Meat is meat."
(Excerpt) Read more at thelocal.ch ...
It would need to be a very fine whine, indeed...
Sounds like a trend started by the Chick fil-A cows to get them to eat less beef and, being there’s a shortage of chickens in Switzerland....
In Germany, in wartime, dogs were referred to as “blockade hamburger”.
However, there is a very interesting lesson to be learned with the abrupt end to (popularly) eating dog in the Philippines. It is the lesson of the “social sanction”, which exists in all human cultures.
The social sanction are the unwritten laws enforced by the people, and politicians crave to either want to put them into the written law and get credit for it, or change them and get credit for it. They vary by country and time.
In the Philippines, dog was for long seen as a delicacy, and was served at fine parties thrown by the wealthy. And by the middle class who wanted to impress their guests. And by the poor whenever they could afford it on special occasions.
But this all changed because of an American tabloid newspaper.
Needing to fill two pages, they created a spread about “The horror of eating dogs in the Philippines!” Otherwise unnoteworthy, it was a little different because it had a mini petition that readers could clip out, and which the tabloid promised to deliver to the Philippine embassy.
They got hundreds of thousands of those petitions mailed to them from across the US by dog lovers. And they were honest enough to package them up and send them to the Philippine embassy.
Who promptly tossed them.
But word got back to the Philippines that, “Americans think that eating dog is *unfashionable*.” Within a few weeks you could not find an upper class party where dog was served. And the middle class, looking to the upper class for trendiness, soon abhorred eating dog as something “only lower class people do.” They shunned dog meat as well.
Sure enough, the government was johnny on the spot, so outlawed the consumption of dog meat, so the poor couldn’t have it, either. Not that anyone cared about the written law.
Today, eating dog in the Philippines is restricted to rural areas and not bragged on any more than it is in Switzerland. Which shows the power of the social sanction.
So you would eat horse but not dog? Horses are nicer than dogs as a rule they are just too large to be house pets.
I like beef. Cows are dumb and hard to fall in love with.
I find this story odd because farmers and rural people in German-speaking countries tend to love animals moreso than Americans. It is not unusual for a dairy farmer in those areas to “name” all of his cows, and affectionly treat them as “part of the family”. I find this “dog eating story” a bit hoax-y
Mmm, mmm good!
Lewis and Clark’s expedition West did well on dog meat. They even preferred it to horse meat.
I lived in Switzerland for 2 years, and they don't eat dogs or cats...any more than Americans do.
It would be like someone interviewing Jeffrey Dahmer about his taste for human flesh and then writing an article about how Americans are secret cannibals, eating their neighbors behind closed doors.
Then after reading it you could say, I liked the Americans, until now.
Amazing how easy it is to slander an entire country...kind of like how the mass media uses the actions of a nut in CT to slander anyone who owns firearms.
My mom grew up in Austria during WW2 and how when meat rations became nonexistent “cat stew” began appearing on the menu. She said that when you made it you had to invite your neighbors, because if they smelled cooking meat they would hammer on your door, thinking you were hoarding something.
OK - cows, pigs, chickens, hot dogs, birds, fish, ducks, snails, alligator, bison, shrimp, crab, oyster, squid, goat, lamb, rabbit, hot dogs, Slim Jims, etc, etc
NO WAY - cats & dogs
The Beagle is one of the toughest. Their friendly nature hides it, but they are pound for pound one of the toughest dogs.
Not from my personal experience. Had a horse once. Dumber than dirt. And he thought he was a house pet....forever tried to get into the house, via the back porch.
If it came down to brass tacks, of course, I would eat dog. Fortunately, it hasn't come to that.
This article says otherwise....nor sure how scholarly it is: http://www.animalsandsociety.org/assets/265_podberscek.pdf
Eat the rich.
It’s a smear article. I wouldn’t doubt that there are a few sickos in Switzerland who eat pets but if you changed the title to ‘Incest still practiced in Tennessee’ and based it on some sicko being arrested for molestation it would be about as fair to the reputation of the decent people of Tennessee as this one is to the Swiss. The title seems to imply that eating dogs and cats was once common, and it never was. Having a Swiss grandmother and as familiar as I am with the culture and recipes something like that would definitely have been notable because of the revulsion factor.
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