“They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” was President Donald Trump’s declaration in the 2024 presidential debate that perpetuated false rumors about Haitian immigrants. Immediately, it sparked outrage: dogs and cats occupy a protected moral category in Western culture, and the idea of consuming them is abhorrent. However, that reaction reveals an inconsistency in the way most Americans view and consume meat. While many recoil at the thought of eating dogs and cats, they accept the slaughter of pigs, cows and other animals for food.
There is little to justify this double standard. The boundary between “pet” and “food” is not grounded in biology, but in social convention. We are taught to love and cherish certain animals, and to completely disregard others. Criticism of foreign food cultures can be valid, especially if there is animal abuse or mistreatment involved, but it is important to apply that same moral scrutiny to our own.
In the west, meat culture is often justified by a misconception — that dogs and cats have more emotional intelligence than livestock animals, therefore making them more valuable. However, research suggests cows and pigs actually experience a wide range of emotions, from fear to anxiety to sadness. They can recognize each other’s faces, use body language to signal their emotions and have even been shown to actively seek out playtime. In fact, research shows pigs outperform dogs in many cases of cognition and memory.
Another common argument for the unequal treatment of animals is that dogs and cats have a unique connection with humans, and are bonded to us through hundreds of years of pet-owner relationships. But should tradition be the decider of which creatures should be killed, and which shouldn’t? Cows are often separated from their children at birth and milked until they have trouble walking, then shot between the eyes with bolt guns as soon as they stop producing milk. Pigs experience castration without anesthesia and are squeezed in tight holding chambers for most of their lives. If dogs deserve to live because they are man’s best friend, cows and pigs deserve to live because they are intelligent and complex creatures.
“We like to distance ourselves from our food,” University of the Pacific food culture professor Ken Albala said. “We don’t want to know what it comes from. We don’t want to know how it’s raised. But we do unspeakable things to animals, so to criticize people because they eat differently from us is absurd.”
While it’s normal for cultures to differ in their tradition and cuisine, drawing hard lines about which animals can and can’t be abused regardless of their intelligence or emotions is cruel. It also enables selective outrage, making it easier to condemn others while ignoring abusive practices in our own country.
“There are other areas of the world where animals are consumed that typical Americans would never consider eating,” culinary arts teacher Megan Miller said. “Does that make that wrong? No, that’s just a cultural difference.”
In 2021, writer Molly Elwood took this double standard to the test. She founded a fake company called “Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat.” Elwood did her best to make things believable — an address, phone number and an official website outfitted with photos of smiling dogs frolicking in meadows, similar to how farms often depict cows and pigs.
What followed was a wave of backlash and even death threats from all over the country by people who were disgusted by the idea of a dog meat farm. One reader wrote, “I have dogs and would never eat them, but a deer, chicken or cow — that’s different.”
The modern, Western view of meat consumption couldn’t be more narrow. In West Africa and Asia, bushmeat from antelope has sustained populations for generations. Horse meat is consumed in France and Kazakhstan, even as a Japanese raw delicacy called basashi. Dog meat was a staple of some Native American diets. Almost all of these traditions operate on a much smaller and less gruesome scale than the American factory farming industry. Demonizing them based on an us versus them mentality rather than on consistent standards of humane treatment upholds a skewed moral standard, and is an excuse for Americans to ignore the conditions in their own food system.
“In Japan, I’ve eaten foods like sea urchin sashimi, sea cucumber and tartare,” sophomore Emily Mashimo said. “It’s important to be accepting of other cultures.”
So the next time you hear a story about a dog being eaten in a foreign country, remember that in that same second ten cows were killed. And ask yourself: what’s the difference between those cows and a golden retriever? Why does one get to play fetch, and the other is slaughtered?
