What’s Wrong With Eating Dog Meat?

Thailand Hotel Guide

• Asara Villa & Suite
• Baan Bayan Hotel Hua Hin
• Baan Duangkaew Resort
• Baan Talay Chine Boutique Resort

Golly! Dog lovers the world over (well in the US and Europe anyway) are trying to get the Koreans to stop eating dogs. They have even enlisted FIFA to step in and put the pressure on the Koreans. See the report here:

Imagine what would happen if suddenly these fastidious people realized that Thais eat not only dogs but insects too!

With over 6,000 restaurants in Korea serving up about 1 million dogs a year, it would seem to be a difficult task indeed to stop the Koreans eating dogs. Imagine how much harder it would be to stop the Thais eating their favorite foods.

Although I had lived in Thailand about 10 years before I married my current wife, I had only noted the Thai fondness for insects from a distance. It wasn’t until my wife and I were married in a simple ceremony at her parent’s home in a small village way outside Ubon that I came close to the practice.

We hired a van to drive up there taking a few of our close friends with us to witness our union and to enjoy a fun filled few days up in the country. I’m not sure what was served up at the reception because there was just too much of it and we were happily draining a couple of cases of Mekhong whiskey and ‘Lao Khao’, the Thai equivalent of moonshine.

The day after the wedding my new family, and there were dozens of them, took us to the Moon River for a picnic aboard floating bamboo rafts. We all sat down anticipating a delicious Bar-B-Q and some seafood.

The first course was mouth-watering banana leafs full of red ant eggs. Hmmm. My friends and I passed on that one while we watched my new family tuck in with gusto. Next came plates of prawns swimming in alcohol. These fellas were jumping around and diving in and out of the brew. Naturally, this dish was called ‘Drunken Prawns’. Thankfully, they were probably so drunk by the time they slid down our throats that they didn’t care that they were being eaten. They were quite tasty.

Next came a selection of deep-fried insects, mostly grasshoppers, but I think there were other things in there that looked like cockroaches too. My Thai hosts assured me that these were very clean cockroaches harvested from among the rice stalks on their farm. Definitely not my cup of tea thanks, but the Thais crunched on them with relish.

The first few times I returned it was much the same. I must say that my Thai family tried valiantly to serve me up food I could actually eat, but they didn’t really know much about farung food. My basic staple while I was up there was usually omelets or white bread spread with margarine, and instant Nescafe for breakfast. I never eat white bread or drink instant coffee, so apart from my terrible hunger pains it was also an expression of my love for my new family that I actually downed it all with a smile on my face.

I’ve learned since then to go prepared and I always take a cooler filled with UHT milk, a pound of butter, fresh coffee beans, and some cheese. I keep the cheese until the Thais drag out their ‘Pla Ra’ fermented fish. So we both sit there with beatific smiles on our faces tucking into incredibly smelly food. Hey! Fair is fair, right?

Pla Ra has got to be one of the most disgusting foods ever for us fastidious farungs. It’s made by fermenting fish in earthen jars buried in the ground. The resulting mess smells as bad as it sounds, but the Thais love it. They heap it onto their ‘Som Tum’, papaya salad and laugh whenever I run from the room. I have banned my wife and cousins from the house when they eat. They have to eat it outside where the dreadful stench can’t waft into the house. I guess the sight of an overweight old man retching was enough to convince them to heed my banishment order.

I’ve even heard of Thais eating live monkey brains, although I’ve never actually seen it. Apparently, they lock the poor monkey into a device under a table with the crown of its head poking up through a hole in the table. Then they take a sharp sword and slice off the crown, something like taking the top off a boiled egg. They tuck in and scoop out the still live brain and eat it. Quite possibly the reason I have never actually seen this is because many of the diners are rumored to get some sort of terrible brain seizure and die afterwards. So I guess Karma really does work.

I started out talking about eating dogs, and I must apologize for the digression, but you gotta admit eating insects, drunken prawns, monkey brains and Pla Ra is definitely on a par with eating dog.

My first contact with eating dogs came about in the Philippines, where it is also a delicacy. The habit may have come about during the Marcos years when everyone was so poor they ate anything they could get their hands on. I believe there are no monkeys left anywhere in the country, either, because they ate them all.

Be that as it may some of them also love eating dog. I was taken one time to the deepest depths of Negros Island by one of my Philippino friends. He lived way up in the mountains in a little village miles from anywhere.

The first morning there I got up and wandered outside. There was his beautiful black dog lolling about with a very bad head wound obviously caused by a severe blow with a blunt instrument. I called out to my friend who staggered out (we had been doing justice to a case of 'San Mig' the night before). He took one look at his favorite dog, grunted, walked inside and returned with a revolver in his hand. He shot the dog right there.

That was shocking enough, but then he picked it up and grunted to me to follow him. We went out to a shed at the back of the house where he hung it from the rafters by its back legs. He slit the skin around the ankles, or whatever you call them on a dog, made a slit down the chest and belly, and then stripped the hide off. Next he gutted it and started to carve it up.

After the initial shock of seeing what he was doing I got over my squeamishness and asked him what he was doing as I watched. I had only recently come from Australia where all our butchering is done well before we see the meat in sterile shop displays.

“We’re going to eat him. It’s a shame he’s dead, but one of my neighbors obviously knocked him on the head and would have taken him to eat if you hadn’t gone out and scared him off. So why waste a good dog?”

When the dog was dressed (strange to use that word when it was actually undressed, but that’s the English language for you, isn’t it?), we carried it into the house and he cooked up a big curry. When it was ready he invited the neighbors over for a feast and we all tucked in.

What did it taste like? Well, it had a strong coppery taste I think. It was a bit hard to tell because of the curry, but it definitely left a coppery after-taste. The meat was nothing special. It wasn’t tough and stringy, and it wasn’t all that tender. It was just meat.

Why did I eat it?

Well, I’ve eaten snake, crocodile, bear, wild turkey and kangaroo tail soup, so why not? I wanted to see what it was like. Later on when I returned to Baguio, north of Manila, I also had some sun-dried dog meat, a bit like the dried beef the Thais serve up here. In fact, it tastes much the same, so who knows? Maybe the dried beef is actually dog meat.

Some Thais definitely like to eat dog meat too. I watched a Thai movie the other night called, ‘Khao Niaw Moo Ping’. It was a tale of a little girl who befriends a stray puppy. The mother dog gets caught by dog-nappers who sell their catch to the local dog food market.

So the next time you sit down with your Thai friends and you are offered some ‘dried beef’ you might want to ask them if it is really beef, or one of man’s best friends.