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Loki was a good dog. A small brown creature with four legs that played with stupid rubber toys, liked to go on hikes, and piss wherever. I was with him for less than a year, but we created a bond that I thought—knowing full well that we’d be separated—would never end.

It was after my roommates and I decided that we should get a dog at some point in our last year at college that we met him. We lived in an apartment off campus, and there were plenty of opportunities to skip class and go hiking, so we searched up and down, left and right for a dog. I was amazed at the prices some of these places wanted for a puppy. Upwards of $400 dollars to rescue a pup. We all wanted to rescue a dog, but to have enough money to feed him, too.

Personally, I had always wanted a dog. My family had one very briefly when I was younger. We adopted Riley from the local animal shelter, but had to give him back when my mother and brother’s allergies got too bad. It was only a week that we had him. My brother wanted to keep the dog so bad, he pretended his allergies weren’t bothering him. Mine certainly were, but they were never as bad as theirs; I must have taken after my father who wasn’t allergic at all.

It took a few months to find him, but we found Loki. I can’t remember if we all didn’t like his name, but we talked about giving him a new one. For selfish reasons. When you meet someone for the first time, your instinct is always to believe that person when they tell you their name. “Hi I’m Andrew,” or “Hello, my name is Kathy.” For some reason, this impulse doesn’t exist for our dog friends.

Later, after failing to come up with something everyone could agree upon, we settled on his original name, Loki. In hindsight, he looked and acted like Loki. He was energetic, and mischievous. He hated other dogs. Any other dog on the path would cower when Loki got to barking. That’s all he was though. All bark. He’d nip at your hands sometimes, but if he bit the hand that fed him, he wouldn’t clamp down. You’d end up with a dog tongue on your hand; part of me thinks he liked that.

After a few months went by, there seemed to be something happening. He became one of us. Just one of the guys. He’d listen to records with us. Hang out. He was the life the party, the few times we threw them. As the year came to an end, two of us had to say good-bye to Loki. I got sad when I realized that I wouldn’t be seeing Loki for a while, maybe not ever again. I still do. He was just a dog, but he was a good dog.

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For three years I worked at a popular drug chain’s photo counter. It was a strange job, voyeuristic; not unlike that movie One Hour Photo except without all the stalking. For the most part, you can just let the digital files print, but film took care. You had to make sure that the little black line wasn’t printed, or that the color/contrast was true. You could fix those easily. The arrow grid was all you needed, left/right to align, up/down for brightness. You watch the photos go by, fix them if needed, then let them print.

Once, I’ll never forget it, there was a man who dropped off several rolls of film. Initially, all I saw was the extra work, but the images that came out stuck in my mind. They were beautiful scenes from Southeast Asia. Bright flowers, flowing rivers, and street scenes right from an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations. Among them was a photograph of the man who dropped off the film eating snake and drinking the blood, which seems relatively common in these parts.

The next series of photos looked like an ordinary street cart. A vendor was sitting next to his grill and food, waiting for the next hungry customer to idle by. Except, upon close inspection of his grill, I noticed that there was what appeared to be the charred head of a dog. I assumed that it was the head of another dog-like animal, because who would eat a dog? Curiosity got the better of me and I asked the customer about what I saw—the first and only time I did this—when he came back.

“Was that you drinking snake’s blood?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s pretty crazy stuff.”

“And was that a dog’s head on that grill?”

“Yeah, they eat dogs.”

Naturally, I asked if he ate the dog—he did not, but it’s a booming business in Vietnam. According to an article in the Guardian, upwards of 5 million dogs are eaten yearly. Not only that, but it’s considered a delicacy; “dogmeat is more expensive than pork and can be sold for up to [Approx. 50 U.S. dollars] a dish in high-end restaurants” Later in the article they mention that dogs are routinely abused, being forced to eat rocks and uncooked rice to heavy them up before sale. They even believe that the more an animal suffered, the better the meat will taste.

Yet, some Vietnamese who eat dog, still keep them as pets. Duc Cuong, a doctor is quoted as saying: “I know it seems weird for me to eat here when I have my own dogs at home and would never consider eating them, but I don’t mind eating other people’s dogs. Dog tastes good and it’s good for you.” While that last tidbit is up for debate, this man is able to compartmentalize two types of dogs: pets and food. And that’s as important a distinction you can have when it comes to food.

I wonder, then, why the photog didn’t eat the dog. As an American, I don’t run into too many places serving snake, but this man had no problem drinking it’s blood and, in a detail disclosed later, eating it’s still beating heart (video, but not the photog). As this 2002 Slate article suggested when South Korea intended to have dogmeat stands around the World Cup festivities: “Norwegians didn’t stop eating reindeer during the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics. American restaurants didn’t stop serving bull testicles during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. No one forced Spain to outlaw cat stew during the 1982 World Cup, and no one is hounding Japan, the co-host of this year’s World Cup, to shut down its sushi bars.”

What is it about our relationships with animals that finds some people saying things like “cows are grown to be eaten, dogs are not. I accept that many people eat beef, but a cultured country does not allow its people to eat dogs,” as Brigette Bardot said on South Korean radio? (From the Slate article above). What animals are ok to eat? And how should we treat them?

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Humans have a unique relationship to the animal kingdom. As far as we know, we are the only animals to consider our place in it, and to consider ourselves outside of it. By virtue of our intelligence, we have wielded fire and reaped the benefits of thousands of years of innovation. Most animals have yet to invent the wheel, let alone the computer. So, naturally, we must be superior, right? (Well, no, not exactly) From our position outside the food chain, we get to watch—as opposed to participate in—the natural order of animals.

Even here in New Haven, Conn. animals surround us. The robin signaling the return of spring, squirrels frolicking in the trees, and, my least favorite animals, insects, have begun to buzz. It’s getting warm enough for fishermen to line Long Island Sound, people are walking their dogs longer, and cats are, well, being cats somewhere. That’s what my cat, Benny, is doing. Sleeping in a warm chair, until he eats, then sleeps at the foot of the bed.

Keeping animals as pets is one of the stranger habits of human nature. As opposed to an ox working the field, Benny is kept for companionship. He doesn’t seem to have it so bad, except when I make him wear human clothes for my own amusement (he looks positively debonair in his winter scarf), and except for the fact that my eyes get puffy when he sheds, the arrangement isn’t so bad for either of us. I sometimes stop to think that without human interaction he would never know what tuna tasted like. Every time we get him a can, he goes crazy. He loves the stuff, but it’s not like he knows how to use a fishing rod. And without him, who would keep the chair warm and crowd the end of the bed?

Benny is just the last in a long line of pets I’ve had; surprisingly, the pet I cohabited with the longest. Most of my early pets we’re not long for this world it seems. First there was Petey, a snapping turtle. My entire family is a little hazy on the details, we all remember him, but not why we had him or for how long. The first pets I am fully cognizant of were goldfish. A family friend had a pet fish supply store, so we had the whole nine yards in equipment. Naming is a very important tradition with pets, and I thought long and hard about what to name this pet. I finally came up with Fred Flintstone Gilson, which is about as good a name for a fish as you can think of. Fred will always be my first pet, a fond memory.

Loki was special, though. I cared for each and every pet I had with approximately the same vigor (you have to expend much less energy on a $0.25 goldfish you won at a carnival than a dog). There was a bond between the two of us, and in the group as a whole. There was something about this furry little mutt that everyone loved. He was responsive, friendly, intelligent, and caring. In less than a year after adopting him he was doing a handful of tricks. He could walk without a leash (when it was safe to do so, of course), and come back when called.

Recently, there has been an increase of our understanding about dog intelligence, emotional and critical. Alexandra Horowitz wrote about this in her book Inside of a Dog (where it would be hard to read), and in an Opinion piece in the New York Times, where she compared her pup to her two-year-old child. It’s common to trot out the “dogs are as smart as two-year-olds” when talking about dog intelligence, but more and more, it’s looking to be true.

MRIs, while more commonly used on humans, have begun to be used on dogs to see if we can decipher some of that presumed intelligence. Doctors train dogs to lie still for upwards of ten minutes while the machine scans their brain as they play audio clips of humans and other dogs. And as it turns out, dogs have a special region in their brain for deciphering vocalized emotions. This allows them to create an emotional bond with their human companion. Unlike Benny, Loki seemed intent on staying by my side to keep me company. When I was happy, he was happy. You got the sense that the lights were on upstairs—a feeling that I do not get from some humans. And without getting too sentimental, I felt like I had a friend in this creature. I suppose this is one of the many the reasons we call dogs “man’s best friend.”

I suppose this is also why the photog had an easier time eating the snake, while only documenting the dog food industry. Because what is our relationship to the slithering reptile? Some humans keep snakes as pets, but most of us share Indiana Jones’ opinion of the animal. This is because the snake as evil trope is rooted in Western Culture. The most popular of which appears in Genesis, the first book of Moses, when a serpent gets Eve to eat the forbidden apple. There is then no reason to cherish the relationship with the snake, and there is no evidence that it will reciprocate emotions. In fact, even those that are familiar with snakes often find themselves at the receiving end of a snakebite.

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The long standing cultural differences is one of the ways in which snakes are different than dogs, that is, of course, other than the fact that they are different animals. This has a major effect on how we treat the animals, and our feelings towards consumption. We put snake meat on pizza, but not dog meat. This explains why the photog felt okay eating the snake; eating snakes is done around the world, even if it isn’t mainstream.

For Americans, it must follow that if dogs are “man’s best friend” here, then they must be so everywhere. Looking back to the Vietnamese man who had dogs at home, but had no qualms about eating other people’s dogs, that seems to be true. So despite the fact that Southeast Asians recognize the dog as a pet, it has become socially and culturally normative behavior to grill up some dog, despite their beloved status.

This is one of the harder aspects for the Americentric to grasp: not all cultures are the same, even remotely similar. American’s have a very specific list of animals that are ok to eat: popularly Beef, Chicken, Pork, and Fish. To a lesser extent, there is Goat, Lamb, Shelled Seafood, and the Thanksgiving favorite, Turkey. And while this list is fairly diverse, it is not representative of local delicacies, game, and international cuisine.

This is what makes what we eat as a species such a fervent debate. Is there a subtle line between what is right and wrong to eat? Or is it obviously culturally relative? Westerners, and Americans in particular, always seem shocked at the vast array of foods that other cultures eat. There is a great anecdote in Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food about a group of Aboriginals whose Western diets were causing them health problems. After going back and eating grubs and kangaroo meat, everyone in the group saw some relief from their afflictions. Aside from some sort of game show, where would you see grub as part of the diet of a Westerner?

Simply mentioning a food foreign to our culture is surefire way to get some attention. A college roommate of mine would often relate to us the time he ate raw horsemeat in Japan. He apparently liked it, and always told us so in Mr. Ed’s voice. Whether or not it was his intention, the very fact that he chose to eat the meat shocked a few of the listeners—a kind of “bet you don’t hear that everyday” story.

My grandmother often remembers raising rabbits to eat when she was a child; meat you don’t often see these days. So when a New Zealand pizza company promoted a new style featuring rabbit meat with a billboard made out of rabbit fur., it successfully created controversy and publicity in its wake. Using rabbits for meat is featured in a famous scene from Michael Moore’s Roger & Me. Using strange and foreign meats is a common trope in film. In Cannibal Holocaust, Clue, and Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom, characters are told that monkey’s brains are a delicacy. Cannibal Holocaust is additionally shocking because actual monkeys were slaughtered and eaten by locals while filming (in addition to a turtle, coatimundi, snake, and pig—although, no humans despite the title).

As with dogs, the killing of monkeys for food seems to shock/upset people. Despite the fact that the reputation as a delicacy is true, monkey brains come from monkeys, an animal we love and adore for their close relation to humans in the evolutionary tree, and for their intelligence. It is upon close inspection that a rule starts to emerge: the smarter the animal is, the more outrage it causes when it is killed for food. And nowhere is this more evident than with sea mammals: dolphins, seals, and whales.

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The call to end the hunting of our sea brethren comes from all corners of our planet, and yet it is a practice that by some estimation is as old as civilization itself. Many readers will be familiar with Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman Melville, which describes in great detail life on a Whaling boat. It is, briefly, the story of a man who seeks revenge on the whale that cost him his boat and his leg. While the practice has largely died out, remnants of this trade can be found all across the Northeast Seaboard. The only difference being that whaling boats have been replaced by whale watching boats. Contrary to popular belief, whaling still continues to this day by American boats.

Yet, much of the focus of the anti-whaling community is not on America, but on Japan. As a country, Japan has been whaling for nearly 900 years, it’s a long standing tradition. They’ve been the targets of a recent ban on whaling off the Antarctic coast, and Whale Wars, a popular Animal Planet program, follows a crew that attempts to halt Japanese whaling activity. Yet, as this BBC News article notes, “Japan had argued that the suit brought by Australia was an attempt to impose its cultural norms on Japan.”

One of the main reasons for this opposition is the endangered nature of many Whale species. But, due to the targets of the opposition, it’s hard not to see at least some of this as cultural elitism, and worse, racism. Most countries skirt the International Whaling Convention by labeling their activities as scientific, but Japan isn’t alone in commercial whaling. Both Iceland and Norway have broken with the IWC and have set their own limits for commercial whaling. These two countries combined kill as many whales as Japan does, despite Japan’s population being 235% more than theirs.

Like Brigitte Bardot’s critique of dog meat consumption, Japanese consumption of whale meat makes us uncomfortable, but slightly more uncomfortable that it’s a non-Western country. The inimitable South Park tackles this issue head on in a spoof of Whale Wars, and those that attempt to stop the Japanese from continuing their pursuits. The episode, called “Whale Whores”, portrays the modern day Japanese as Samurai who senselessly kill whales and dolphins in water parks around the world. The punchline comes when Stan, the main character in this episode, stops the killing of whales and dolphins by convincing the Japanese to kill—and presumably eat—Cows and Chickens. Stan’s father congratulates him in the final moments of the episode for making the Japanese “normal, like us.”

Many times over we can see people with the best intentions try to take long standing cultural and ethnic foods away from people because they aren’t like them. Those inflicted probably don’t hear the very rational concern of wiping out species, but only notice that you have taken away food from their plate. Whether it be whale in Iceland, dog in Vietnam, seal in Newfoundland, or grub in Australia, diverse peoples eat diverse fauna. And while I could never eat a dog, I can understand that some people might eat dog. The same goes for each animal (and because I’m so grossed out by insects, I think the grubs are worse).

If you can separate the argument from culture into pure ethical territory, then eating any animal doesn’t seem so strange. Sure, there are cultural differences, but that doesn’t make any one culture wrong. Pigs are highly intelligent creatures, and yet you don’t see as many people clamoring for the end of pig slaughter as you do for the end of whaling. And that’s when the lens should be trained back on the treatment of animals around the world.

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We’ve already glossed over a strong point to be made against the consumption of dog meat in Vietnam, and that is the belief that the more an animal suffers before its death, the better it will taste. This is obviously wrong, and I know this as a meat eating American. Any time I’m offered the choice of a free range animal, whose treatment was one iota better than non-free range animal, I go for that choice. It seems arbitrary, but have you heard about the way animals are raised for their meat in America?

Early on in a Rolling Stone article by Paul Solotaroff, he describes an arrival at a Pig farm by a Humane Society infiltrator: “no training could prepare her for the sensory assault of 10,000 pigs in close quarters: the stench of their shit, piled three feet high in the slanted trenches below; the blood on sows’ snouts cut by cages so tight they can’t turn around or lie sideways; the racking cries of broken-legged pigs, hauled into alleys by dead-eyed workers and left there to die of exposure.”

One need not go on from this description to evoke the feelings of disgust that the whole article attempts to evoke. Familiar as we may be with highly publicized videos that turn up on the evening news, the tales of animal cruelty in this country are one of the few urban legends that turn out to be true. And this is exactly why what the Humane Society does is so important; they are “performing a service that the federal government can’t, or won’t.”

Solotaroff tells us that the Humane Society has found evidence that pigs eat actual trash, including broken glass, syringes, and the genitals of other pigs. This is the life of 113 million pigs a year. That number is barely 1% of the number of chickens slaughtered each year, which is approximately 9 billion chickens if you don’t want to do the math. And while stories of mutant chickens born without beaks, feet, or feathers may not be true, there may not be another word that is better suited to our poultry: “thanks to “meat science” and its chemical levers — growth hormones, antibiotics and genetically engineered feed — you weigh at least double what you would in the wild, but lack the muscle even to waddle, let alone fly. Like egg-laying hens — your comrades in suffering — you get sick young with late-life woes: heart disease, osteoporosis.”

Of the 33 million cows—remember are much larger and therefore produce more meat, and up until recently was the most popular meat—slaughtered for meat, many unfit for human consumption are used for other purposes, like feeding other cows. They, too, are pumped full of antibiotics, because despite their four stomachs, they cannot eat the corn meal that farmers give them (this was outlined in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma). The naturally grazing animals are kept in pens, and, like the chickens and pigs, are left to stand in their own excrement until it is time for their slaughter.

How can we cast an accusing glance at those that eat dog meat, or those that hunt Whales in the wild? This is a far cry from the stories of Native American’s hunt for buffalo that we learn about in school: eating the meat, using the skin for clothes, and tendons for thread. This is the outright mutilation and degradation of an animal. The cows are “kept […] fat and sad so they wouldn’t fight back when led to slaughter.” The conditions that we slaughter animals being so ruthlessly abusive raises the question of whether there is any humane way to kill an animal.

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But what exactly is humane? The obvious root of the word being that which we call ourselves, it applies today to the treatment of animals as well as our fellow humans. An approximate definition, derived from the OED, would be to show compassion and minimize suffering. Our dominion over all the creatures the creepeth on this Earth does not give us right to treat them any which way we please, and much of what goes in these slaughterhouses is inhumane. Even the most ardent meat-eater could agree that the treatment of these animals before the slaughter is wrong.

Is it even possible to show compassion for an animal we know that we are going to murder? How do we create an environment that essentially tricks an animal into not knowing that it will be murdered for it’s meat? The title of Solotaroff’s piece is “Animal Cruelty is the Price We Pay for Cheap Meat.” Not very uplifting on the subject. But there is a chance that we can change the way our meat is processed, the first step begins with eating less.

Mark Bittman, food journalist for the New York Times, released a book titled VB6, an acronym for Vegan Before 6. His idea is simple, and aimed at a healthier lifestyle for humans, not animals. You eat vegan/vegetarian for all your meals and snacks before dinner, getting in as much plant-based food as possible, then for dinner, eat whatever you want. He explains in an interview that it’s completely “pragmatic,” because who wants to get teased into breaking a diet. By allowing for that time when you know you’re going to eat a hamburger or chicken wings, you’ve already eaten healthy all day.

How does this help the cows and chickens that you’re still eating at night? Bittman continues his argument for consuming less meat—as opposed to no meat—by arguing for eating quality meat. You might end up paying more, but opposed to the beliefs of some Vietnamese, animals don’t taste better when they are tortured or gorged with food they shouldn’t be eating. And once again, the answer is simple: eat less meat, less animals need to be raised to meet demands, leads to less crowding, leads to less filth, leads to less antibiotics, etc. In Bittman’s own words: “If you raise fewer animals, you can treat them more humanely and reduce their environmental impact.”

And the environmental impact of raising that many animals to feed the population is massive. The national companies that ship to the national food chains to serve subpar food to national consumers takes a toll on our environment. One of the biggest methods to help combat that (other than avoiding fast food at all costs) is to eat local. Upscale restaurants started a trend a few years ago called “farm-to-table,” and that’s exactly what it does. Your food comes to you direct from the locally-sourced farm that grew it. This trend has started to trickle down to your regular non-michelin-starred restaurants, and the more it does, the more impact it has on where we get our meat.

When you eat less, and you eat local, you are taking away some of the need to industrialize the meat sources. I’ve taken to buying, at least, my eggs and milk from farms I’ve visited. (The dairy farm is old school, too. It’s been open since 1639, making it one of the oldest continually open businesses in the world). Seeing the cows whose milk I drink roaming fields and eating clover, not penned up and being force-fed cornmeal, chickens that are not covered in feces, gives a great deal of relief.

It would be foolish to think that we will, in the near future, be a vegetarian planet—it would be foolish to suggest that we should. Those that believe in evolution should understand that our bodies have grown accustom to a certain lifestyle, and like the Aboriginals that went back to their customary diet, I believe we can healthily exist as a meat-eating society, and still treat our animals humanely. But it means growing up as a global society and learning how to farm and hunt intelligently, it’s also not to suggest that those fears that we won’t aren’t justified.

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Meat is murder, any way you cut it. The fine line is whether or not you believe that is something we should be doing. If you support a meat eating society fully, do you support whaling and dog meat industries as well? The abuses of the farming system? If you are fully against meat eating, do you go against millions of years of human evolution? Do you hold other animals to that standard?

Perhaps there is a middle ground where, while both sides may not get all that they want, but both sides get something. We have to end animal cruelty at our industrial farms, and the only way to do that is to eat less beef. We have to admit that some cultures eat foods that are icky to us, that some of the foods we eat may be icky to them. All we can do is to continue what we have been doing: not eating what we don’t want to eat. With demand there need be a supply. Never adding your name to that demand, means that supply won’t increase. It’s the simplest way to ensure that no one ever kills an animal you don’t want killed in your name.

We are animals ourselves, a fact that too often gets passed over by trivial human things like couches and the internet. We have our human instinct, that of complex problem solving, but we also have our animal instinct: the will to survive, as individuals and as a species.

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In one vast-reaching creation story, an all-powerful creator creates all the plants and animals for man:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

These four sentences have dictated our attitudes towards animals for two millenia. Modern science is changing all of this. Starting with Darwin 150 years ago, we’re coming to the realization that in the long scheme of things, we lived as animals with animals. Only with the advent of farming, writing, and civilization do we start the unique branch of evolution that we are currently on.

Yet, without all the dog MRIs, or the whale song, monkey’s ability to use tools, that other animals are smart. That they have knowledge and intuition, they still reign over the wilderness that we forfeited so long ago. More importantly, I could have looked into Loki’s eyes and told you that we are not alone on this planet. We share this world with beings that are more like us than we are willing to admit.