SEOUL: South Korea aims to ban eating dog meat and put an end to the controversy over the practice amid growing awareness of animal rights, a ruling party policy chief said on Friday (Nov 17). The Korean practice of eating dogs has drawn criticism from overseas for its cruelty but there has also been incre
I’m a vegan, but one argument specifically against allowing dog meat trade is that it often encourages stealing companion animals (aka pets) to make a quick buck. Sometimes they’re held ransom and people have to pay the thieves to keep a member of their family from being killed and eaten. Wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
Also, dogs were bred specifically to live alongside humans, to form bonds with us. To do that to any organism and then treat it like livestock is a special kind of monstrous.
So I’m in favor of drawing as many lines as possible when it comes to animal consumption of any kind. And then, if the situation makes you uncomfortable about some of the other lines you’ve drawn around cows, pigs, or chickens, then you analyzing those in more depth too is also a win in my book.
Nuanced take. 👍
This is what I was talking about a vegan will have coherent arguments because they have been thinking about it.
Coherent indeed. Something about dog being held ransom so eating dog is bad?!
thats just blackmail it has nothing to do with commercializing dog meat… that stuff is already illegal
My point is that it happens more frequently in places where dog meat is frequently consumed.
It makes no sense to ban the consumption of dogs simply because you are afraid of dog thieves. Do you ban driving a car because some people steal a car?
Nothing in this world is completely beneficial, but you can’t ban everything.
Stealing a car takes way more effort than kidnapping a pet. I’d also bet that people have way more personal attachment to pets than cars because pets are beings with emotions and cars are not.
What about windows? Should we ban that as they are easy for thieves to break?
Whether you have more personal attachment to a car, a pet or anything else is a completely personal thing, everyone should have their choice.
Almost nobody is attached to their windows. Most people treat pets as family members.
If people stealing pets to consume them is a huge problem, then it makes sense to ban the consumption of pets because the benefits of the law outweigh the drawbacks on a society. People who eat dogs ““ethically”” can easily move on to other animals, and the people who continue to consume stolen pets can be punished more harshly, causing fewer people to steal pets. That law would be a net win because the good it does for pet owners vastly outweighs the bad it does for dog consumers.
Why don’t you rob the richest people and share the money with the poorest? Or just ignore the interests of the minorities? Apparently, the good outweighs the bad based on your calculation.
We should. The opposite literally happens on a daily basis.
The US used to do that. It didn’t end well for anybody on multiple occasions. There’s a reason why US politics is so focused on civil rights, because the good outweighs the bad on a societal level.
99％ percent of people can be much richer if we share the 0.1% richest people. This never happened. Besides, do you believe Robin Hood is allowed by law in modern society?
Do you think what China does to Uyghurs, and what Russia does to LGBT is justified? Apparently, they believe the good outweighs the bad, only at the cost of a few people.
The CCP’s interests don’t always align with the wellbeing of Chinese people. The interests of Russia’s elite are even more divorced from the will of Russians.
You’re bringing up counterexamples that I literally already refuted with previous examples. Slavery existed in the colonial US. The founding fathers put an end date on slavery because they knew it was a plague on society. People later on extended that date. Tensions rose until a civil war broke out. African Americans had more rights but weren’t equal. Unrest rose until lawmakers gave them more rights. Similar thing with women.
Where in that paragraph do I state that genocide is good? Where do I support exploitation?
No, but I did actually see a used bike store get shut down because too many stolen bikes were finding their way there. Sometimes to end a practice you have to go downstream and destroy the market for that thing. There’s no market for vehicular deaths - they just happen.
But it still makes no sense to ban it nationwide or worldwide, or to forbid it by law.
If you banned driving cars, there just wouldn’t be any cars around. That analogy has little to do with dogs. What is it about a ban that makes no sense to you?
You can replace cars with anything else and it still makes no sense. It’s no one else but the thieves who should take the consequences.
We ban things we want less of. More eating dogs means a bigger market for all dog meat, which means a bigger market for theft. I want less of that.
People don’t steal things that no one wants to buy.
I’m talking about the side effects of fostering a culture where eating a non-livestock animal is ok. My argument is that this kind of culture is pointlessly cruel to an animal that we’ve explicitly bred to be a companion.
One element of discouraging a culture is government action, a ban (coercion). I argue this is a necessary step in ending a cruel practice.
The other is cultural compliance (people behaving in a certain way regardless of the presence of law enforcement officials). I argue this is a necessary step as well, by way of education and improving access to alternatives.
The analogy would not be to ban driving cars, but ban the resale of cars. The incentive for theft is the value; if you remove the value, then there is less incentive to steal it.
So to answer this hypothetical question, should we ban the resale of cars? No, because the owner can be insured for the monetary value of their stolen vehicle. What is the monetary value of a pet? I don’t believe this can be quantified.
Many people like their cars just like the way you like your pets. They should be treated equally.
This debate sure took an unexpected turn.