Be Honest! Have You Eaten......
 

dog or cat in any of the Asian countries??? Please tell me you haven't...........

Yup. Can't tell you otherwise.

No, but only because I kept walking into the wrong restaurants. Old Vietnam hands tell me that dog is pretty good, but it costs. Kikahead, tell me more. For the life of me I can't understand why someone would eat rabbit but shy away from cat.

same here, been trying but cant find a place or just feel strang eating alone..

Neil - it may have something to do with bunnies being herbivores and cats being carnivores - apart from the sentimental moggie thing somehow we think that rabbit meat is cleaner. I spent a dreadful week in a health farm once where prawns were described as "cockroaches of the sea".
bonniebroad - you shouldn't come across dog meat unless you go looking for it - in Asian countries it's a specialty.

I occasionally have family members traveling in China, and I have a horror that they will accidentally eat one or the other. Another question that I have ............. I've read that the Chinese feed their pigs human waste, and I'm wondering if the meat is safe to eat, or does that make any difference? Maybe it's just the thought.......... :-(

I have never eaten cat but I have eaten dog on numerous occasions overseas. Tastes good--similar to pork. As long as I do not see my meat alive prior to eating it, I have no problem. Snails seem grosser then ((&)).

Why would dog or cat be so bad? I understand that we keep them as pets but you don't eat your pet.

I ate snails in Asian Reflections restaurant in Caravelle Hotel, Saigon. Quite good - shells are sort of longer and fatter than the French version. This was followed by Chinese carpaccio which may be taking fusion food a bit far.

Kikahead, you ask why not eat dog? If I have to explain, I'm sure you wouldn't understand!!! Oh, well, different strokes for different folks..........but not me, not in this lifetime!

Bonniebroad, I really think you're fretting over nothing. When I was much younger it was a popular urban myth in Australia that Chinese restaurants served up cat disguised as chicken, despite a complete absence of evidence of any such practice and the testimony of long-serving health inspectors that they'd never seen it happen. My view was that if the chef could convince me that cat was chicken he deserved congratulations. The fact that patronage of Chinese restaurants never declined suggests that few people really believed it anyway.

It was self-evident nonsense of course, given how cheap chicken is and how hard you'd have to work to catch and skin the average scrawny alley-cat. I very much doubt that the situation in China is any different, so my guess is that the chances of "accidentally" eating cat would be infinitesimally small. As another poster has pointed out, dog (and civet cat for that matter) is a delicacy and priced accordingly, so it's a deliberate choice.

There are people (I know one or two) who from childhood memories of "Bambi" won't eat venison, others who stopped eating pork after watching "Babe", others who won't eat kangaroos in the mistaken belief that they're cute and cuddly, and the same impulses will of course stop them eating Fido, Tom and maybe Bugs. That they don't have the same problem with many other animals may be due to the fact that most modern urban dwellers never set foot in an abbatoir or fishing trawler. Rural people everywhere, and especially in poorer countries, are not so sentimental - they can't afford to be.

What I do object to is cruelty to animals. Concern for animal welfare is a relatively recent and still partial development in Western countries and to say the least isn't exactly widespread in Asia. To me that's a bigger issue than the almost non-existent possibility of accidentally eating a house cat.