Dog!
In the Canton of St. Gallen in Switzerland, dog meat in the form of sausages is a tradition. However, the Swiss government no longer allows dog meat to be sold commercially.
In Germany, before there was a Germany, there were many war-like states, principalities, and bishoprics. Usually, when these German speaking region went to war with each other, they often exhausted all of their grain production for producing meat animals. So they went for a meat that wasn’t that reliant upon grain for fattening: dog meat.
Dog meat has been a war-time staple for the Germans. It’s not really a meat of first choice, as it was in St. Gallen, but during the various wars that German people have fought (and there are a great many), dog meat became a war time food. I don’t think dogs were eaten during the Second World War, but evidence is pretty clear that during the Wars of Unification and the First World War, dogs were eaten in Germany.
The French also ate dogs during the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War. Poodle was supposed to be the best meat of all the dog breeds.
Now, I’m leaving out the countries where dog meat is still socially acceptable. Most of East Asia has a tradition of eating dogs (except Japan and Indonesia– Muslims can’t eat dogs!) . Lewis and Clark’s expedition ate dogs all the way to the Pacific, and many Native American people ate them, too. The people who settled the Valley of Mexico ate dogs, including the hairless ones.
The people who first domesticated dogs probably did eat them, too. This might be even more significant when the evidence now points to an East Asian ancestry for the domestic dog.
And I’m sure that no one who has read this blog has eaten it. Heck, I haven’t eaten it. Most of us wouldn’t even think of eating a dog– that’s too much like eating a person.
There was also a breed developed in Hawaii for eating called the ‘Poi Dog’, because that was the main food it was fattened up on. =)
Yes, but it is often said that it went extinct. Every description I’ve read of this dog is a dog with poorly developed teeth and jaws (including the muscles. Muscles attach to the top of the dog’s head, so the poi dog had a flattened head.) It also lacked much of what we regard as intelligence. I think the dogs didn’t go extinct. Instead, their peculiar traits were the result of the terrible diet they had to eat, which is a high carbohydrate dieth with little protein. Further, it didn’t have to be chewed, so the muscles and jaws never developed properly. Once dog eating was banned in Hawaii, these dogs were fed a more appropriate diet, and the supposed poi dog phenotype disappeared.
However, if you go to Hawaii, you do see dog that look like the typical Polynesian dog. I saw one of these at the Mauna Loa area several years ago. The dog was hanging out at the last convenience store on the highway, just before it ends at the lava flows. This dog was tawny with a black muzzle, maybe 30 pounds. His ears were erect. He looked like something of a primitive dog type. But he obviously hadn’t been fed poi. He had all of his faculties, and he loved getting scraps from us.
The poi dog, I think, was nothing more than the Hawaiian landrace of Polynesian dog that was fed an inappropriate diet. After all, that’s what you do when you raise animals for meat. You feed them lots of fattening foods, like sweetened grain. It’s not great nutrition, but if the animal is meant to be eaten, you want good flavor for the meat and a healthy size at slaughter. You aren’t really concerned about the mental faculties of the animal at all.
When I was a child, there was a chain of stores called S.S. Pierce, a sort of American equivalent of Fortnum & Mason’s. Among it’s offerings were tins (cans)and packages of exotic foods. Every Christmas, my father would pick up some outre ‘delights’ for stocking stuffers. We tried fried grasshoppers, rattlesnake meat in some sort of sauce, chocolate covered ants, quail eggs, frozen whale meat and others I don’t remember, but I don’t recall ever he brought home dog meat in a tin or otherwise. I do remember we fed our dog at the time, a cocker X, frozen horse meat mixed with a corn & fish blend of dry meal called Casco. I got old enough to realize the dog was eating horse, and threw a temper tantrum. Dog was switched to Ken-L-Ration.
Would the dog have eaten canned or frozen dog? Probably. Dogs have a better understanding of the basic necessities than we do and don’t suffer our cultural or religious prohibitions.
I’ve read that it’s actually quite hard to get a dog to eat dog meat. The term “dog eat dog” refers to hard times, which was the only time that one could get a dog to eat a member of its own kind.
Hmmm… so it’s difficult unless under extremely adverse conditions to get a dog to consume one of it’s own kind? Yet the modern wolf, it’s supposed ancestor, has no trouble killing and eating it’s domesticated relative. More fodder for the serotonin theory perhaps.
Interesting, a dog will be coprophagous before it will eat it’s own kind. Us humans with our cultural influences would do the reverse!
I don’t claim the modern wolf as the dog’s ancestor. I claim the ancient wolf as the ancestor of both.
Coprophagia very common in dogs because of the paucity of good food sources in human camps. I mean they pretty much lived on feces, cast-off bones, and unpalatable parts of the prey of ancient humans. My guess is that feces were more common in those camps than good quality meat. And feces aren’t terrible nutrition if you have a very acidic stomach to kill the majority of the bacteria. I know that as soon as I say this someone will come out with a bizarre fad dog diet based upon this pithy speculation.
Believe it or not, I’ve thought about tendency of dogs to eat feces for a long time. The Navajo name for dog means (If I can remember correctly) the “eater of horse feces.”
Now as for the wolf, I think that the book Never Cry Wolf is actually poor biology for modern animals. It is really poor. There are wolves that live on rodents. However, they are the Ethiopian wolves for the Simien and Bale highlands.
However, the parts of the book that are valid are the parts that he should have identified better with the views of the Ihalmiut (A.K.A. “People of the Deer”– the Eskimos/Inuit who lived inland and hunted caribou) whose testimony on wolves was worked into the fiction. They knew wolves before they were widely persecuted in the Arctic. So maybe the wolves were far less “xenophobic” in those days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ihalmiut
The value of that book is more the story of Ootek than the fictionalized account about the wolves, although this book did save the wolf. This book is like Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the wolf. The Soviet Union, which for some reason loved Mowat’s books– perhaps because of his sort of hero worship of communist Arctic Exlorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson– banned wolf hunting. (I’ve not read Mowat’s account of his trip through the Soviet Union in the 1960’s, but I hear it’s fellow travelerish).
I shouldn’t have said, “modern wolf”. Mea culpa! I’ll give myself 5 lashes with Mr Whippy, the lunge whip with the jack-a-lure tied to the end that the dogs and I play with.
As for the Simien wolf, I am not sure it’s any more a “wolf” than a coyote is. While it lives in a family group, the members each appear to hunt independently, not as a unit. And it does live on rodents because there isn’t much else available in it’s current environment.
I don’t know all that much about it. Did it spring from wolf ancestors, jackal ancestors, or an ancestor to both? Jackals and Simien wolves are the only true canids other than dogs on the African continent and neither have gotten all that much attention.
The Ethiopian wolf was thought to come wolf-like ancestors that once lived in Africa. It was once thought that it’s one of those basal wolves, like the Himalayan wolf or the Indian wolf. But it may even be older than that. However, determining which species these all belong to is really hard to figure out, because it’s now quite clear that wolves were once very diverse in terms of genetics. It’s possible that the wolves of the Indian subcontinent and Africa got separated from the main wolf population earliest. I do think it’s interesting that those two Indian wolves have unique MtDNA haplotypes. I don’t know whether they are separate species, though. The Mexican wolf has a unique MtDNA haplotype, but it’s considered a mere subspecies. And the Eastern wolf and Red wolf have coyote MtDNA haplotypes, which may have happened as wolves moved into the Eastern US and crossed with coyotes or the hybridization occurred as wolves and coyotes were both killed off in the Eastern US. The wolves simply couldn’t rebound as fast as the coyotes did, and the remaining wolves interbred with coyotes. It’s also possible that they are a remnant population of ancient canids ancestral to both wolves and coyotes. I think it’s more likely a combination of the first two theories, rather than the one.
However, there is another interesting theory that the Ethiopian wolf is descended from the pre-historic African wolf, which split off the main wolf line much earlier.
It is amazing how much this wolf does look like a coyote, though. It has some unique behaviors. It forms packs, but its diet is virtually all rodents. The packs typically have only a single female in them (perhaps interbitch aggression is higher in this species?). Although they are as big as the some subspecies of the Eurasian/North American wolf, they do not kill domestic dogs. Instead, a single domestic dog can easily dominate a whole pack of them. In Bale, the wolves are regularly interbreeding with dogs. In Simien, this is unknown. The dogs are also giving them rabies and distemper, for which they have no immunity. This is an isolated remnant population, so they suffer from introduced dog diseases just as the Native Americans suffered from introduced European ones.
Interestingly, there is another supposed wolf of Africa, although mitochondrial DNA studies now say it’s a golden jackal. Canis lupus lupaster was its proposed name. It lives along northern edges of Libya and Egypt. It’s a wolfish looking jackal. And it may be that the same thing that happened to wolves in the Eastern US and Eastern Canada that happened to this animal. As this race of North African wolf became extinct, it began to interbreed with golden jackals, specifically bitch jackals. That’s why it has the golden jackal mtDNA. That’s just a theory of mine; perhaps studies of its nuclear DNA will find some wolf genes.
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