Several conversations about dogs

Yesterday in class, a Zimbabwean student-teacher named Pippa told me she was going to return to Zimbabwe after the course ends next week. "I'm not attached to Vietnam," she complained, and then listed a few reasons for her disfavor -- one of which was the practice here of eating dog. I asked her how many dogs the Vietnamese really eat, and she frowned and said, "A lot. You're probably eating it in your pork curry."
"So the little dogs tied up in my alley, will they be eaten?" I asked.
"Most likely," she said.
I was reminded, too, that early on in my stay here, I had been kept awake by a baying dog for about a week. I told Pippa that when I finally began to get accustomed to it, the crying stopped one night and never resumed.
"You see," she said.


Later I asked Lena, my friend who was born here, whether the Vietnamese eat a lot of dogs. She seemed slightly put out that I had brought it up and said, "No, not a lot. It's very uncommon." She paused, though, and added, "In the north, they eat it a lot more. But in the south" -- where Lena is from -- "no, not very often."
"The dogs then here, the ones I see tied up, they won't be eaten?"
"No, no!" she reassured me. But then she said that dog-snatching in the north was occasionally reported and that she had personally heard of people whose dogs had mysteriously vanished.


Since this conversation, I've noticed many more small dogs in the alleyways and a few more on the streets where they keep some women vendors company. They are often very small -- Chihuahuas are popular -- and very surly. Perhaps this helps keep the dog snatchers away?


Tonight I asked Vien -- the hotel owner's son -- whether he liked dogs. He didn't know how to answer the question at first. "What breed?" he asked. So I clarified the eating breed by making hand-to-mouth gestures. (Pippa the Zimbabwean told me that during one of her first lessons she had to teach "likes and dislikes." When she asked the class whether they liked cats and dogs -- a discussion question posed innocuously by the English textbook -- the students wanted her to clarify whether she was asking about dogs or "hounds," and Pippa, who is a vegetarian, said she got a bit upset.)

When Vien was satisfied I was talking about food -- and after he had told me his favorite breed of dog was a bulldog -- he said that he had eaten dog last Sunday at a restaurant with his friends. He says he probably eats the meat once a week -- but clarified that the dog he eats is bred on a farm, and he showed me a picture on the Internet that I can't find now, but it looked like a tough and scrappy yellow dog that you might see in northern Maine hunting with the locals.

However, the plot thickens. I just ran downstairs to ask his sister Chau what type of dog is bred on a farm to try to bring up the same photo. After a confusing five or six minutes of conversation that involved a lot of drawing of dogs with little ears, big ears and floppy ears as I tried to pin down the Vietnamese name for the dog that's raised for meat, she finally said, "No, no. No type. Because in Vietnam we eat all dog."


According to wikipedia and a few other Internet sources, Vietnamese men in particular like to eat dog because it's meant to enhance virility. Consumed at the end of the month, like Vien did on Nov. 30, dog is also meant to bring good luck.

There's much more to investigate around dog eating! More to come. I read about an animal rights group in China trying to discourage dog eating there, and in Vietnam, Vien said there's plenty of people who don't think humans should be eating the type of animal they also like to keep around the house as a surrogate family member.