Having lived in Holland and Poland for extended periods of time, I realize I may have chomped on Black Beauty's cousin more than once. These things happen and, if I am honest, why salivate over a field of gamboling lambs and repulse at the thought of Bud Clydesdales in a nice cream sauce. But then there is honesty and then there is honesty:
A new study of dogs worldwide, the largest of its kind, suggests a different answer, one that any dog owner is bound to find repulsive: wolves may have first been domesticated for their meat. That is the proposal of a team of geneticists led by Peter Savolainen of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Sampling the mitochondrial DNA of dogs worldwide, the team found that in every region of the world all dogs seem to belong to one lineage.
The single domestication event seems to have occurred in southern China... There is a long tradition of eating dogs in southern China, where dog bones with cut marks on them have been found at archaeological sites. Dr. Savolainen said wolves probably domesticated themselves when they began scavenging around the garbage dumps at the first human settlements, a theory advocated by Ray Coppinger, a dog biologist at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. As the wolves became tamer, they would have been captured and bred. Given local traditions, Dr. Savolainen suggests, the wolves may have been bred for the table.
Taboos are funny things. I don't really like dogs that much and find the dog obsessed humans I know, well, a bit weird. Dogs make houses smelly. A lot. Your dog, too. About as bad as a cigarette smoker's house. That plus all the poo not to mention having fang marks in my face are enough to warn me off the beasties. But I am not inclined to eat them. Not curious at all. Yet if I faced a plate of dog and that can of aquarium fish, tinned gourami I think it was, I would probably nibble on Fido.
Would I be comforted at that moment knowing I was only living out my evolutionary past... as well as the dog's?
Comments
Ben (The Tiger) - September 8, 2009 10:58 pm
And I'd probably nibble on the gourami.
seanie - September 9, 2009 11:36 am
I'm with you on dogs. I find dog owners to be odd as well, on a mild obsessive compulsive level. Generalizing here, but I also find that often cannot fathom how others do not want to have poochie jump all over them, lick their faces etc.
I would eat dog, no problem, if it was what was available on a street in a foreign land and I was hungry, but not under normal circumstances, mainly for the same reasons I won't eat seagull.
John Cross - September 9, 2009 12:36 pm
I must say I am a little doubtful about wolves being kept for food. I understand that dogs need some meat in their diet and I would have thought that hunting for meat for your dogs would be counterproductive. I thought it would be easier to raise an animal that would eat grass. Perhaps, the dogs were given the bones which they could crack, but still it seems like a strange way to get meat.
John