It doesn’t take much
understanding of the dog’s history to realise that its first job was to fill
people’s bellies. Dog people don’t like talking about eating dogs. For those of
us who live with them, who learn to understand how they think and feel, who
adopt them into our families as “honorary humans”, not quite children but also
not quite as ‘animal’ as other animals, eating a dog seems almost
cannibalistic. (I bet some people have never forgiven Roald Amundsen and his
colleagues for eating their sled dogs during their successful expedition to
become the first explorers to reach the South Pole.) That’s possibly why most
of the books I’ve read gloss over the subject of dog meat and say that the
dog’s first job was to help on the hunt. But that’s impossible. It would have
taken countless generations of breeding before dogs came to assist us rather
than compete with us when hunting. Dogs were our first livestock. Just as
thousands of years later the first domesticated horses were originally raised
for food and only after used for other purposes, so were dogs. The first
domesticated dogs were ready made meals.
There’s a curious
clue in the DNA of the human tapeworm Taenia solium that reveals we’re a
species with a long history of eating dogs. Genetic studies of this tapeworm
indicate that humans acquired it by eating dogs. Other studies show that
ancient pigs ate us or dogs and that’s how they acquired another tapeworm,
Taenia asiatica.
Eventually, we
developed techniques for raising more energy-efficient animals to eat, the
herbivores. Dog dropped from the main course on the menu but remained an
emergency food supply, a reliable source of nourishment when crops failed or
hunting was unsuccessful. Dog meat was widely eaten wherever there were dogs;
in Europe during times of famine, most famously during the deprivations of the
French and Russian Revolutions and those of the two World Wars.
Needs can turn into
pleasure. There were dog meat shops in Germany until the 1980s while, according
to the Swiss newspaper the Rheintaler Bote, in the Appenzell and St. Gallen cantons of Switzerland there was and allegedly still is, a local
tradition of wind-curing dog meat.
Dog meat has been
vital for survival elsewhere, especially amongst the indigenous people of the
Arctic regions, the Inuit. In Arctic Canada, oral histories of the now aging
Inuit who hunted before the arrival of the snowmobile have been recorded.?Mary
Irraju Anugaaq Sr., tells this story.?“…one time Juugini was out hunting at the
open sea during winter and he fell in the water and was drowning and the only
help he got was from a dog. As he was drowning, his own dog saved him (…)
during a starvation period, Juugini was very hungry and freezing and he killed
the dog and ate it.”
Issacie Padlayat says
this about “Qimmiit”, the Inuit word for “dogs”.?“The Inuit and Qimmiit were
very knowledgeable of the land and never got lost even when they travelled
everywhere (…) They were our only means of transportation, I don’t think anyone
would have survived without the use of dog teams. They were used for long
distance travel and hunting. Even when the Inuit were starving, we used to
survive by eating our dogs (…) We used them for trapping, hunting, to transport
our belongings to shore when we had to travel by qayak in the spring…I’ve seen
a few summer dogs .. which they used for caribou hunting during
summertime.”?Elsewhere, dogs were actively bred and fed for their meat. I
mentioned in the last chapter that the Polynesians fed their edible dogs cooked
taro root. Studies of ancient dog bones in Mexico show that the Aztecs’ dogs
ate a diet that consisted almost exclusively of maize. That would only have
been possible if they were actively fed it. When Hernando Cortes arrived in
Tenochtitlan in 1519 he wrote in a letter that “small gelded dogs which they
breed for eating” were sold in the marketplace.