Man Masticates Dog

Roger Cohen’s IHT column about eating dog in China is raising hackles in the dog-loving precincts of the Internets. Let’s establish first that Cohen definitely did eat dog.

The menu was predictably dog-dominated: dog paws, dog tail, dog brain, dog intestine, even dog penis. We went for a dog broth, simmered for four hours, with Sichuan pepper and ginger. It was warming, with a pepper-tingle. The meat was tender, unctuous, blander than pork, but stronger than chicken. Later, the owner, Chen Zemin, explained how the best dogs for eating had yellow coats, weighed 30 pounds, and did miracles for arthritis.

But the beagle-owing Cohen has a larger point to make.

I’m not happy that I ate dog. But I’m happy China eats dog. It so proclaims both a particularity to be prized in a homogenizing world and its rationality. Anyone who doesn’t want China to eat dog must logically embrace pigs as pets.

Fair enough. Still, if I were a pig, I’d be a little concerned. I think I’d just as soon be eaten.