"So your parents are going to Shanghai?" I ask him.
Before he can respond, an older, beet-faced man with a rotund belly almost belches out:
"I've been to Shanghai."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. For business. Great place. The Chinese are nice. But the Japanese are totally different. They're so racist over there."
Above is a fairly rough transcript of a conversation I had with a white guy at the gym yesterday. I usually work out with my friend these days, and this guy sometimes randomly butts into our conversation at times. He's at worst a mere distraction from our sets, so we usually humor him. But this comment was painfully offensive. Predictably, he followed up with "I'm not racist, but..."
But why, I thought. Why do I find it offensive that someone points out racism?
Because it's akin to a Chinese citizen saying, "All Americans are racist." It's demeaning and it's a stereotype. I think there is a tendency these days to claim something is racist--even if that 'something' is not. I don't think it's that we've become hyper-sensitive to racism; it's that pointing out someone else's ugly prejudices can sometimes make us feel better. It's odd, but simply being on the right side of progressive issues doesn't mean one is automatically freed from the constraints of prejudice.
To my thesis: You should have no problem with Koreans eating dog.
The above picture's a joke, just to clarify.
Now this is presuming that you are not a vegetarian or vegan.
Why shouldn't you have qualms about dog-eating? Because dogs are animals, like chickens, cows, and pigs. A strong moral test of what you eat is, it seems to me, whether it caused suffering or not. And presuming you eat meat, you should be (or are) aware that you paid for someone to raise and slaughter an animal. In many instances, that animal was raised in unsafe conditions. Watch Food, Inc. for a great primer on this topic. Many chicken coops are way too crowded--the chickens are given too many hormones, causing them to not even walk because their breasts are enlarged. Cows are now fed corn and injected with antibiotics; many live in dung-infested squalor. The list goes on--whether it's venison, pork, or veal, suffering is involved.
But John, dogs are pets/companion animals. They're more intelligent than cows/chickens/pigs.
Oh please. There's good, quantifiable research on the sentience of cows and chickens. As Peter Singer has written, the question is not, "Can it reason?" but "Can it suffer?" For example, a rock has no preference to be thrown or not--it's an object. But animals do. Throw a chicken around or tip over a cow: it suffers. So even if dogs are more intelligent, intelligence shouldn't preclude the extermination of less intelligent creatures. Pain is pain. A cow feels pain when it is slaughtered. A low IQ doesn't automatically make you a candidate for greater suffering.
Moral issues aside, there's the cultural double standard of being disgusted at the dietary choices of a people. Why? Why is so gross that Koreans eat dog? Is it not the carcass of a pig you are eating when you eat bacon? You cannot have it both ways: you cannot be outraged at the killing of dogs and not have a second's hesitation to pay for the killing of another animal.
Here's an example. It's as though you're against child abuse but secretly pay money to NAMBLA. You can't choose which kinds of suffering to be concerned about when your actions allow such suffering to continue.
This seems to me a correlative to the conversation with the white gym-goer. Simply being outraged about racism does NOT mean that you are perfectly enlightened and free of prejudice. There's hypocrisy in reinforcing a stereotype under the guise of pointing out a wrong. There's hypocrisy in eating bacon and hamburgers with joy while admonishing others for eating another species of mammal. And cows, in fact, share 80% of its DNA with humans (82% for dogs). That's why you shouldn't have a problem with Koreans eating dog. Because then, you have a problem with yourself.
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