Should We Eat Our Pets? CNN’S John Sutter Argues Putting Dogs On The Menu May Be Beneficial

They may be regarded as man’s best friend by many, but there are still a lot of countries worldwide who believe in putting dogs on the menu, and CNN’s John Stutter believes America should seriously think about joining their ranks.

In an opinion piece for CNN, Stutter suggests that putting dogs on the menu is an option that could be both beneficial and helpful to us humans.

Stutter stresses that, according to the ASPCA, the United States euthanizes 1.2 million dogs per year. The writer then asks:

“Would eating them be so different? It actually could be seen as helpful.”

To illustrate his point, Stutter then quotes from the book Eating Animals by vegetarian and novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, which reads:

“Unlike all farmed meat, which requires the creation and maintenance of animals, dogs are practically begging to be eaten.

“Euthanizing pets, amounts to millions of pounds of meat now being thrown away every year. The simple disposal of these euthanized dogs is an enormous ecological and economic problem. It would be demented to yank pets from homes. But eating those strays, those runaways, those not-quite-cute-enough-to-take and not-quite-well-behaved-enough-to-keep dogs would be killing a flock of birds with one stone and eating it, too.”

Stutters admits that in a country where we spend $58.5 billion on pets and pamper our dogs with Christmas presents, putting them on a menu in your local restaurant would be considered by most as unthinkable, repulsive, and cruel.

Yet Stutter believes that when dog lovers in the West see images and hear stories about the dog meat trade in places such as Vietnam, they do what he does:

“Imagine your dog, or your childhood dog, in one of these cages. You won’t think about the bigger picture.”

Stutter argues that the bigger picture should not be outrage and shock that people are in fact eating dogs, but the cruelty of the trade where dogs are “smashed into cages; suffocated; skinned alive; strung up and beaten,”

Stutter adds:

“Unless you’re vegetarian or vegan, you don’t have any moral high ground to stand on. Here in the United States, a place with an unhealthy and ridiculously hipster bacon obsession (witness: bacon donuts, bacon pie, bacon in bloody marys), eating dog could be seen as a reasonable alternative to pig, which is another highly intelligent animal, capable of being a companion to the likes of George Clooney.”

Stutter believes that we should all examine exactly why we don’t eat dog meat in favor of other animals and asks:

“Is it because we spend so much time with dogs — looking into their eyes, talking to them, walking them, picking up their crap.”

What do you think? Would putting dog meat on the menu be a good or bad thing?