<B>Dog meat eating and hypocrisy of animal lovers</B>

In your issue of Monday 25 August 08, it is reported that dog meat relished by Chinese workers has been condemned by two associations, MSPCA and PAWS and they have gone as far as lodging police complaints.. If Chinese food habits and their ritual slaughter are repulsive, then how about ours? Tens of thousands of Mauritians slowly slit the goat?s throat on the 2nd of January each year to be able to collect the blood to which salt is added to solidify it and then cook it as a relish mixed with the insides.

It isn?t any different from a staunch religious practice which in a recent past some South African farmers had found it inhumane and had refused to export cows to Mauritius for slaughter. Isn?t tangue (hedgehog) a Creole delicacy? Aren?t they hunted from house to house, clubbed down to death the way the Chinese have reportedly slaughtered the dogs? If you are an animal lover and you condemn Chinese rites and palate, then you must not spare any other practices, be it Hindu or Islamic, Creole or European. Slaughtering methods differ from culture to culture.

Personally, I had been on several rat-catching expeditions with my colleagues in the bush in Africa. It?s similar to crab catching which is done by spotting the lived-in holes and digging through with a hoe till the hairy rodents are reached, nestled in a cluster. All the hunters do is hold the head and the tail between the left and right thumbs and forefingers and pull deftly to snap the backbone. Flame-roast field and bush rats are a delicacy to some tribes just as salamander is to others. And how about the Mauritian kids relishing wasp pupa (moutouk) sauté in onion? Asians and Africans living in landlocked countries would throw up a Mauritian delicacy: the prized octopus.

During the 2002 FIFA World Cup, South Koreans tried to break the taboo by proposing dog meat in posh hotels to European visitors; and they were proud of it the way the French are proud of their culinary patrimoine: frog legs. One man?s meat could be another man?s repulsion but we must guard ourselves against hypocrisy. The contention that the Chinese represent only one percent of the Mauritian population and they are not free to their culinary heritage is definitely against the basic rights of the individual as guaranteed by our Constitution. If such were the case then we should have long ago banned cow slaughter.

How about the members of the MSPCA and its sister organisation PAWS? Don?t they chow the cow, relish the chicken, forcibly sterilize the dogs, take mating dogs for stray dogs and induce them to sleep? They must stop their sister acts.

<B>Dharumvir TAKOOR</B>