Don’t play with your food

Don’t play with your food

The second day of the second week of college, and I was already in the lost land of eternal boredom. I was engaging in the interesting activity of discreetly incorporating expletives in my sociology notes, and only half listening to the lecture. Pretty soon, this interesting activity also lost its novelty, and I was desperately looking for something else to interest me. With nothing else to do, I turned to the lecture, and I could sense from the inflection in the prof’s voice that the climax of whatever he was talking about, was going to yield something interesting.
As things turned out - it was a pretty interesting climax. Apparently, people in Mizoram looked upon street dogs as a delicacy (although it was not in the interests of Maneka Gandhi). This one statement was really godsend, as it enabled me to spend the remaining lecture contemplating the many implications of this behavior, and therefore I effectively killed boredom. As some people in the class made various noises to demonstrate their queasiness over so unusual a culinary item, a smart-aleck sitting next to me tried to relieve his boredom by pointing out the fact that people had grosser things on their menus worldwide. He happened to mention, amongst other things, squid, jellyfish, cockroaches and bats. The noises in the immediate vicinity reached new heights of queasiness-demonstration, and only subsided when the prof announced that he needed to continue his lesson.
But the smart aleck had a valid point – pieces of dog in your tummy – big deal. I think I see why this is, at least, a bit on the weird side. First of all, squid, jellyfish, cockroaches and bats don’t exactly have the reputation of being man’s best friend. They just jump from their habitat to the chef’s table, or make kids who will land up there. Dogs, on the other hand, catch drug smugglers, sniff out bombs, help rescue trapped bodies, bark at strangers, get jealous of babies, wag their tails whenever they are happy, and most of all… umm… how do they put it? – yeah, “mark out their territory” in convenient places. A dog kept at home, is more often considered as a pet than edible livestock.
Apparently, things are slightly different in Mizoram. Would look good as a tourism jungle: Mizoram - the land where stray dogs are a delicacy. Yes, mongrels are the most delicious amongst all the species of dogs, as any good Mizoramite would know, so people species of dogs, as any good Mizoramite would know, so people
actually trade mongrels for Pomeranians and Alsatians, and I think, give a little cash to the mongrel owner to boot. A mongrel that is brought up on home food, as a pet is preferred to a stray mongrel that eats anything it can find. There might be something in for the corporation in this one. Here is, a solution to the stray dog menace staring at you in the face. Just transport all of them over to Mizoram, get back the Pomeranians and the Alsatians, and sell them off here to make a profit. No need to put humans through the messy procedure of shaving the lower backs of dogs…
Maneka Gandhi, would disapprove even of this method of taking care of the problem, and I somewhat happen to agree. Put bombs in the stomachs of your cows, and electrocute your chicken, but please don’t send your dogs to Mizoram – because it’s slightly more inhuman. There really is something pretty queasy about eating dogs. That’s like eating your pets. And to some people, pets are like family. One day your dog is chasing its own tail, or more likely, marking its territory, and the next day it is getting digested. Like in the morning you can play with it, and then you can have it for dinner. And in some remote corner of Africa, a few tribes believed that they could do this only with babies.
That issue is slightly more indigestible, so I will not elaborate.
-Aditya MJ