I howled last night as I listened to Trump repeat the apocryphal, sensationalist, and xenophobic claims that (legal) Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating the neighborhood canine and feline pets of the (white) people who live there. I remember my high-school friend Kathyrn Lee who was the daughter of Vietnamese parents and my classmate in German class. We never talked about food – certainly not about eating Fluffy. I was 14, and my interests were elsewhere.
Some years later, near the end of the war in Vietnam, I started hearing stories about Vietnamese immigrants eating neighborhood pets – cats most often. I had no personal knowledge of this, and the stories seemed a bit far-fetched. This evening, I went to Wikipedia to examine the canine and feline culinary preferences of various cultures. It turns out that cultures as diverse as those of China, Japan, and Korea have eaten those meats. Until 2018 when it became outlawed in the US by federal law, it was legal to eat cats in 40+ states. It turns out that eating pets is not beneath Americans.
I think that eating predator species is a practice fraught with danger from ingesting concentrated toxins. Foragers consume vegetable matter contaminated with this toxin or that, and the predators eat the foragers. The higher up the food chain you go for dinner, the higher the concentration of toxins you ingest – mercury, dioxin, lead, oh my! Vegetarians and Vegans may be on to something, I think.
Back to eating pets. Tonight, in honor of Trump’s absurdist claims, we prepared dogs – as we often do once a month or so. I call these Xoloitzcuintli dogs in honor of the Mexican hairless. I think that I have posted about them before.
This afternoon, perusing my social media feed, I noted one post that allowed as how the Donner party ate their dogs. Another post said that in starvation scenarios, people will eat their dogs, and that dogs will do the same to their humans – but the difference was that the dogs would wait for their humans to die.
It was a symbolic nod to Shep, I think.