Be honest - who here has eaten dog meat? I have eaten dog meat several times as well as donkey meat. Donkey Hot Pot is very nice.

@johnchen: where do you get 'sin'? Are you Muslim? I'm pretty sure eating dogmeat would be considered a sin in Islam.

I have eaten dog here, in Beijing and S Korea. Not bad at all. Near Beijing, in Hebei, I came on a street of dog restaurants. Live dogs in cages and slaughtered dogs hung on racks. I think they used blow torches to burn the hair off after the dogs were killed. Most were skinned.

Donkey is excellent. For breakfast, we had donkey in buns.

"but simply avoid the moral question entirely by making a point not to see the animal being slaughtered" says we go to the butcher to buy meat to 'avoid the moral question'. implies avoiding the moral q is why we go to the butchers to buy meat. bollox. i go to the butcher coz that is where people who have other trades buy there meat in an ordered economy. stop weaseling around. you always go off half cocked. i wish you would think before you post.

@Dazzer: You misunderstood, perhaps I wasn't clear: what I meant to imply was simply that getting meat from the butcher, which is entirely practical - I also buy meat from the butcher - makes it easier to avoid the moral question, and that that's what people do. Many people have never seen an animal slaughtered in their entire lives.
The division of labor, for which there is a lot to be said, does often have a tendency to obscure the consequences of one's actions from conscious consideration, don't you agree? One easily and habitually gets used to norms of behavior and stops considering them and what they entail - as, for example, dogmeat eaters do, in areas where dogmeat is in the market and there are plenty of dogmeat restaurants.

Note that I'm not saying that it has to be this way. Reflecting on it all is not a bad tendency, and limits unpleasant surprises, such as: Why, really, is that guy shooting at me?

An explanation, either by Burroughs or one of his buddies (Kerouac, Ginzberg et al), of the title of William Burroughs' novel NAKED LUNCH: "That frozen moment in time when everybody sees EXACTLY what is on the end of everyone's fork." (I don't think he was particularly focusing on eating habits at the time, and he was not a moralist).

there you go again with implicattion. what i am sayting is -you still make it sound like the PURPOSE is to avoid the moral thing. it aint. the PURPOSE is practicality. - just coz you might feel guilty about eating meat, dont mean others do. avoiding the yuk factor also has nothing to do with moral thingy. if there is an avoidance of th emoral thingy it is incidental, not the reason. there is no causality

@Dazzer: As you say, the PURPOSE is primarily the practicality/efficiency of the division of labor, not to avoid the moral thing. I think one SIDE-EFFECT of this, however, is often the propensity of people, who tend to see food in the market rather than on the hoof, not to think about the whole process & their part in it.
Is this clear now? We agree, no?

Seems to me this is the case in many areas of modern life - and in SOME instances (I'm NOT talking about the present one) it CAN be, and IS, easily used INTENTIONALLY by producers/merchandisers etc. to encourage the average dude only to think of what he sees right in front of him: the commodity itself, regardless of how it got there - my guess is you can think up your own examples of how this works - but this leads to a general discussion far away from the OP.

Now I'm not sure of what I think about the woman's actions who paid the money to save the dogs, but she did connect her feelings (at least) for dogs with her behavior. I think that a certain moral consideration, which one may or may not agree with, could logically take her, or anybody, farther in the same direction.

Every evening near my house a guy sets up a dog mi xian stand. He starts about 9pm and leaves about 2 am. The drunks love to eat dog after drinking.

i dont think about the whole process when i swith on a light, turn on my computer or fill a glass of water. put on my clothes and shoes (sweatshop issues) do you? do you think about how much precious water and agrochems is used to grow your wheat for loaf of bread and how much damage the tranpsortation of wheat for your bread does. do you think of what happens to you poop when you flush the toilet and where it goes, the eutrophication it causes? no coz if we thought about all of this we would not have time to funciton

ive had that dog mixian, it was ruff==