It's all cognitive dissonance in the end. People are quite happy to have illogical and inconsistent beliefs because it lets them remain entirely ethical in their heads.

They will even become hostile when you challenge this because you are threatening the foundation of their ethics and mental health.

Otoh, relating to something is based on itself. It's a choice, not an obligation. In one ethical framework you're right, it's irrational to treat dogs better than pigs. In another, both lives are unimportant, but one picks dogs one level up for their utility. Inanimate objects also "experience" that. When you're sawing a plank, it's woodwork. When you're sawing a hammer, it's disrespect to the tool.

I’m pretty confident if someone filmed themselves sawing a hammer in half and filmed eating a dog. I know which one of these would receive hate and probably be taken off YouTube.

I didn't intend to make these look comparable, in part due to the fact that these two cultural sets are different in size and vocality. If the point of this comparison is to provide a non-selection based counter argument, it pretty much cannot.

Dogs are carnivores. It is incredibly inefficient to raise dogs for meat, because you have to feed them meat to do so.

This pretty obviously isn't what people are principally reacting too, but it is massively understated when people get into "why do we eat A and not B?"

This doesn't seem to explain the reaction to even the smallest amount. I don't believe for a second that even 1% of the anger is because the consumer has wasted resources on their food. Or people would be furious about beef when chicken is massively more efficient.

Perhaps it plays a part on conditioning folks through generations on what is viewed as livestock. Dogs for a long time are not, except perhaps in China, which has only started looking into reclassifying dogs from "livestock" to "pets"

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-...

>even 1% of the anger is because the consumer has wasted resources on their food

Mao Zedong used that reasoning during China's cultural revolution for banning dog ownership

> Dogs are carnivores.

Omnivores, not carnivores.

Ref: https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Canis_lupus_familiaris/

Please let's not pretend to ignore that some species are more "human like" than others.

- Plants are less "human like" than insects - Insects are less "human like" than sharks - Sharks are less "human like" than pigs - Pigs are less "human like" than dogs - Dogs are less "human like" than primates - Primates are less "human like" than humans

Pretending that this is is irrelevant doesn't help discourse.

And yes of course this sorting is subjective, some people may find pigs and cows "just as" "human like" as dogs - but most people won't.

Since dogs have been specifically bred to be very close to humans (being companions, living in the home, etc.) whereas pigs and cows have been bred to be eaten, this shouldn't be surprising.

> And yes of course this sorting is subjective, some people may find pigs and cows "just as" "human like" as dogs - but most people won't.

I honestly find it a very strange idea to say dogs are more human like than pigs.

Have you ever socialized with a pig? It is immediately clear to me that they display intelligence and emotional awareness of a far higher level than dogs. With pigs, it almost feels as though they are mute humans, trying to communicate in some way but being unable to do so due to an inability to speak, similar to dolphins and nonhuman apes. — They are also inquisitive creatures that inspect their environment and seem to apply some level of cognition to it that I never saw in dogs.

It's typically a North American - or sometimes Western European problem. As people become more lonely, they rely more on their companion pets. But ignore the obvious contradiction that they eat pigs, chickens or cows each day.

I'm not sure anyone else really worries about it from what I've seen, having traveled around.

Dog = carnivore domesticated as ally(superior smell/high speed etc)

Cow = herbivore domesticated for milk/meat

Eating dogs is terribly inefficient since they are carnivores. Seems fairly obvious that hunter gathers wouldn't have typically done this, and that it is a recent thing in regions that had famines & excess stray dogs.

Inefficiency wouldn't matter for hunter-gatherers, as they're not the ones that feed the animal (they hunt, don't farm). Also pretty sure that dog-eating isn't a recent things, I don't see why people "back then" wouldn't eat stray dogs in periods of low resource.

More importantly, inefficiency most definitely isn't the reason for which people on the internet "become very angry" at the idea of eating dog.

It most certainly would matter for hunter gatherers. They hunt and they would be hunting the same prey as the dogs. They are feeding the dogs by giving up some of their potential prey as food whether thats by giving it to the dogs after they kill it or allowing the dogs to kill it and eat it instead of them.

it’s just a lifetime of conditioning really

I also remember reading about a criminal defence attorney who did not handle cases involving sex crimes.

Apparently he was fine with defending murder suspects, but not suspects charged with even street groping. Or Gerard Spong's statement of being willing to defend anyone charged with anything, except Dési Bouterse; there are certainly worse military dictators on the planet.

Yeah we're not really physically different from humans who thought sacrificing people to the sun was the sensible thing to do... we've got an infinite amount of things to believe

An attorney? I've had a hard time finding any attorney (not in US) for my grand-uncle who groped an underage girl on the street. Almost everyone refused, despite my request was only to get any information about the case^ and where it may possibly go, not the actual defense. The person who agreed to help said they wouldn't do it too, but they were asked by people they couldn't say no to. (Uncle ended up in an asylum deemed mentally unfit, freeing my family from making hard decisions about his action.)

^ e.g. checking whether that could be a setup, a misunderstanding or an overreaction to an innocent/unconscious action; it wasn't any of that.

And these people would defend murder suspects?

How very strange. — In many jurisdictions defence attorneys do not have a right to refuse any case they are competent in and timewise available for, something I approve of.

In my country, default defense attorneys work ~together with a prosecution side, they basically fill in process-required papers and read the characterization aloud, that's it. No one of them would help me to understand the situation until it's potentially too late, in case of some sort of fabrication or pressure, which I suspected. They wouldn't refuse, they are just useless. I had to look for a lawyer on the "market" side of it, who brought me right to the investigation office head. Through that I learned the facts and future options to discuss them with my family. Yes, they hesitate to take these cases without even trying to hear details, but are happy to defense murderers. It's unfair legal-wise, because many such allegations recently became unfair and tv-popular, so no one is insured from it.

Regrettably, the situation is more complex than simply having personal moral qualms about representing an alleged sexual assailant. In a jurisdiction without a shield law, the attorney rules of professional conduct may effectively require you to argue that the victim was asking for it.

Some cultures still eat monkeys and it's not really a taboo.

We owe dogs a great debt for helping humanity for many thousands of years.

So did all the other animals.

I have never personally been helped by any dog.

Collective responsibility is such a strange philosophy. I owe an entity because a member of it's helped a member of my species in the past?

What does this even mean... care to elaborate?

I think dog meat anger is mostly the result of Yulin Dog Meat Festival in China. [1]

It's completely unregulated and the animals (dogs, cats etc) would often be tortured and killed by amateurs because properly killing an animal is harder than it looks.

Dogs are also not eaten for meat or taste and mostly done for superstition.

1 - https://www.animalsasia.org/us/media/news/news-archive/china...

I haven't read that article yet, but from what I know, dog meat is eaten all over China all of the time, just not very much of it. But it is mostly a thing poorer people do, indeed for the superstition that it somehow warms the body or something.

And then the northerners say it is only done in the south and vice versa. And I've personally seen a veterinary student from china get very angry every time someone mentioned Chinese eating dogs...