Strange Foods. Jerry Hopkins

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      Today, dog remains popular in southern China, Hong Kong, parts of Japan, Korea, much of Southeast Asia, and to a lesser degree in Mexico, Central and South America, but not without controversy. For years, organizers of the world’s most famous dog show, in England, welcomed sponsorship from the Korean electronics giant Samsung, until the International Fund for Animal Welfare protested in 1995, claiming that up to two million dogs were processed for the Korean food industry annually.

      When such protests earned worldwide media attention, drawing attention to the slaughter of dog for meat in Thailand, Britain’s National Canine Defense League complained. It was no crime to kill and eat dogs in Thailand, so there was little the government could do to satisfy anyone at the league. Still, when Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip visited Bangkok in 1996, officials in Sakon Nakhon—the province where most of the dogs were killed-vowed to enact measures to try to keep any dogs from being butchered during the five-day visit so as not to offend Britain’s royalty. It was unlikely, however, that they would be anywhere nearby, as the province is 341 miles from Bangkok.

      Men in the dog business must be selective. If the dogs haven’t eaten well, the meat may be stringy and possibly unhealthy, and many of the strays have rabies or mangy skins. In some Asian countries today the movement is not only to regulate the slaughter and promote cleanliness, but also to identify establishments where dog meat is served, because sometimes it is substituted for something else. For example, I was served “wild boar” in Saigon that I’m sure wasn’t boar—the day after seeing a flatbed truck loaded with caged dogs on the highway leading into the city. A coincidence? Perhaps.

      I have also eaten dog in China and Vietnam. As a photographer friend took pictures of a skinned dog just delivered to a restaurant in China’s Yunnan province, a woman beckoned to us to come in. On the stove, she had some bite-sized, stir-fried haunch in a wok, left over from lunch, with a taste like cooked beef, slightly greasy, as dog, I’m told, often is. Two weeks later, in the mountainous region of northwestern Vietnam, near the Chinese border, I was served thin slices of dog tongue stir-fried with garlic and vegetables and while visiting a weekend marketplace in the same province I saw more than a dozen well-fed dogs of various breeds for sale (for about $10 apiece), and later I observed members of the hill tribe prominent in that area leading dinner home on a leash. The same year, 1998, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development said there were at least fourteen million dogs in Vietnam, their numbers swelling as more and more farmers turned to raising dogs instead of pigs.

      In Thailand, I found dog in the open markets as well, butchered and ready to go, but also cooked into a rich stew that sold for about eighty cents a portion, and deep-fried into a sort of jerky that was very hard to chew. This was in the province that more or less declared a moratorium on dog during the British queen’s visit, where on the average day, I was told, approximately a thousand dogs were killed for markets in the region. This region is also known for a kind of Oriental dog tartare, where raw dog meat is chopped almost to a mince, mixed with a few spices and finely chopped vegetables and served with the dog’s blood and bile. Unlike Vietnam, where most of the dogs that are cooked are tender puppies, the adults wind up on the plate in Thailand, so tough that minced is the easiest to chew and most digestible.

      In Korea, hundreds, perhaps thousands of restaurants serve rich soups (costing about $10 for a medium sized bowl), casseroles ($16 per serving), and steamed meat served with rice ($25). It is, as in other places, technically illegal to sell cooked dog meat, and restauranteurs do so under threat of having their licenses revoked. However, an appeals court in Seoul in 1997 acquitted a dog-meat wholesaler, ruling that dogs were socially accepted as food. Continuing government concern about the nation’s image has led to periodic crackdowns, causing some restaurants to remove their outside signs or move from main streets to small lanes, away from the usual tourist haunts. And many now identify the special dishes not as dog, but instead use names like “Soup of Invigoration.”

      As a protein source for human consumption, cats have a briefer history than dogs. At least, there are fewer historical references and while felines continue to find their way to the supper table from South America to Asia, the consumption level is comparatively quite low. This may be explained by the fact that through the ages, human regard for the cat has swung so widely—from worship to blasphemy and back—and at neither extreme did the small creature with the heart-warming purr and sharp claws ever seem as right for a stew or grill as their larger relatives, the cougar, the panther, the leopard, the lion, and the tiger.

      There are, of course, numerous cases of the domestic cat being eaten for survival, just as Amundsen ate his sled dogs in the last century. In 1975, for example, the British correspondent Jon Swain was held captive in the French embassy in Phnom Penh following the invasion of the Cambodian capital by the Khmer Rouge. “With no end to our internment in sight, the shortage of food was becoming serious,” he wrote in River of Time (1996). “Reluctantly, Jean Menta, a Corsican adventurer, and Dominique Borella, the mercenary who had been keeping a low profile in case he was recognized, strangled and skinned the embassy cat. The poor creature put up a spirited fight and both men were badly scratched. A few of us ate it, curried. The meat was tender like chicken.”

      So, too, in 1996, cats were skinned and grilled in Argentina under the media’s harsh glare, causing an uproar in homes throughout the country and in the legislature. The press and politicians asked, were people so poor they had to eat pets? The answer, of course, was yes.

      The same year, in Australia, Richard Evans, a member of Parliament, recommended the country do everything possible to eradicate the country’s eighteen million feral and domestic cats by 2020 to prevent them killing and estimated three million birds and animals every year. John Wamsley, the managing director of Earth Sanctuaries, went a step further, urging people to catch and eat feral cats, recommending what he called “pussy-tail stew.” Another uproar shook the media.

      It isn’t always need that puts the cat in the pot. At Guang’s Dog and Cat restaurant in Jiangmen, a city in southern China, the owner, Wu Lianguang, told reporters in 1996, “Business couldn’t be better. The wealthier the Chinese become, the more concerned they are about their health and there’s nothing better for you than cat meat.”

      In northern Vietnam in the 1990s, cat joined dog on many restaurant menus in the belief that asthma could be cured by eating cat meat and that a man’s sexual prowess could be aroused or enhanced with the help of four raw cat galls pickled in rice wine. As a food, it was enjoyed raw, marinated, grilled over charcoal, or cut into bite-sized chunks and dunked into a Mongolian hotpot with vegetables. According to a report from Agence France Presse, a dozen restaurants specializing in cat meat opened in just one district of Hanoi and about 1,800 cats were butchered every year in each of them, with the cost to the consumer rising from US$3.50 to $11 in just two years.

      Cat meat-generally not so greasy as dog—was a favorite of Hanoi gourmets until 1997, when the government forbade all further slaughter. Why? Official figures showed that as the country’s cat population dropped, the number of rats multiplied at an alarming rate, ravaging up to thirty per cent of grain produced in some districts around the capital city. The restaurants were held to blame.

      The same year on the other side of the world, in Lima, Peru, a last-minute appeal from Peruvian animal-lovers persuaded authorities to halt a festival of cat cookery intended to celebrate a local saint’s day. Organizers of the event announced with regret that the annual festival honoring St. Efigenica, scheduled in the southern coastal town of Canete, had been canceled at the insistence of animal rights activists. However, cat continues to be considered a delicacy and it remains on local menus, without any public display.

      A Swiss chef who worked in a five-star hotel in Asia smiled when I mentioned cat cuisine. He said he ate cat in northern Italy and enjoyed it, and if anyone wanted to do the same and lacked a recipe, it tasted so much like squirrel or rabbit, all they had to do was find a recipe for one of those and substitute.

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