To Eat, or Not to Eat (Dog)... That is the Question

What is the fate of the sweet, little dog that walked with us yesterday through villages? We ARE in dog-eating country after all and the villagers were unusually inquisitive about him and stared at him WAY more than us. It was all a little bit suspicious and left us with a pang of guilt as we hopped on the bus and left him to his fate standing on the roadside smiling after us :(

So you may say that the question I posed is not a question at all, the answer is OBVIOUS. Which is what I would have said too at the onset of this trip. But then there were the hordes of strays in India + Nepal - Mangy + flea-ridden, barking ALL NIGHT LONG so that some nights I got little to no sleep. And though it was immensely disturbing and would haunt me for weeks, I began to understand (at least a little bit) why locals would torture strays for fun. Dogs were a PROBLEM. If you barely have enough food for your family you're certainly not going to be feeding a PET.

Next we arrive in Southeast Asia where the locals have a slightly DIFFERENT method of dealing with the problem - They eat them. I won't elaborate on some of the stomach-churning images we've been witness to at the markets, but after getting around my initial shock + disgust, I've forced myself to reevaluate my feelings about the issue. So WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL?! People NEED to eat and there's a FREE source of protein running around in abundance. They don't have a problem with it so why should I? This has been my frame of mind the last few months. People in Southeast Asia DO have small pet dogs that they adore and fawn over, but they're not strays, and that is the difference.

Now back to our walk and the sweet, little stray that tagged along with us for a couple hours... In just that short time I was reminded of the one thing that sets dogs apart from many other animals - They're good companions. That fact alone may be the deciding factor, at least for me, to this moral + culinary dilemma. That, and the fact that they eat poo.

Postscript - One week later as Darin is on the bus having backtracked to Kaili to hit an ATM, he spots who else but our little, furry friend... Right where we first found him on the side of the road. What a relief to know that he didn't become someone's dinner :)