Siberian Husky Gravy

With apologies to my dog loving readers:

Here in the deep, velvet-black of space, where Furlong Colongy 1 is nestled between black holes and among binary dwarf stars, there is a dish. It's not made of porcelin or any modern platey material. Nor is it a metaphorical plateful of insults. In fact, it's not even a dish at all, if you understand proper English. Yet you might say it's the finest dish: Siberian husky roast slathered in Siberian husky gravy. I could almost hear a soft, echoing *woof* *woof* *woof* *woof* as I licked my fingers in satisfaction.

Okay, enough histrionics. Doggy doo doo is for the dogs.

In Korea, like in other Asian countries, dogs are animals people raise for consumption. Just as we think there is nothing wrong with eating cows, pigs, or chickens (vegetarians excepted), Koreans don't think twice about wolfing down a mouthful of delicious dog meat.

As my adult students tell me when bring up the subject: dogs are the same as pigs. They are raised expressively to eat.

This is not surprising though. People all over the world eat meat. People like its taste and they will generally transgress even the most stringent moral codes to get a taste.

Take England as an example. Relatively speaking, England is a new country when compared to Korea's almost 3000 year history. When the druids were still enervating trees, the Koreans were building their first civilization, The Three Kingdoms.

New countries ususally have more land and less people, while old countries usually have less land and more people. This means that dogs did not become a favorite meal in England, because there was enough land to raise other animals. In mountainous and land scarce Korea, however, this was not the case. Cows and pigs were very expensive to raise, because of the lack of land and demanded a high price when sold, because of the millions of people demanding it, which meant only the richest Koreans could afford such meats.

One day, when we were discussing dog meat, one of my students started to make nationalistic overtones about how "dog meat consumption is a tradition of Korea that should not be made fun or or looked down upon by Westerners". I could understand his irritation, but being who I am, and knowing what I know, I was quick to point out that dog meat consumption in Korea is purely the result of economics, and that it will probably die out as a "tradition" in the next twenty years. The only reason modern Koreans enjoy eating dog is the historical fact that there has been too many people, and too little land - exactly what you'd expect from a long-standing civilization. Everyday Koreans simply could not afford pork or beef, but they still wanted to taste meat, so dog meat arose to meet this demand.

If America hadn't had the vast amount of land that it had in the beginning, it too would have developed a taste for dog meat over many centuries, but because it was a new country, and it had an excess of land, dogs were never eaten.

*WARNING* Graphic Photo: Click here only if you want to see cooked dog *WARNING*