Captain Cook compared Tahitian dog to English lamb
When James Cook's crew reached Tahiti in 1769, most of them agreed that a South Sea dog tasted nearly as good as English lamb. Whether dogs count as food or family has always depended on where and when you ask, and the answer has shifted with famine, faith and migration.
Across the Pacific, the answer changed with geography. Austronesian settlers brought dogs from Taiwan into the Philippines, where they served mainly as hunting companions and were often buried beside their owners. On small Melanesian and Polynesian islands with no wild boar to hunt, dogs lost their job and became competitors for scarce food, and on many islands the original Lapita dogs were eaten to extinction. Hawaiians raised dogs and pigs alike and rated dog above pork, and were puzzled by the attitudes of the first British and American visitors.
In the Americas, customs varied from nation to nation. The Comanche forbade dog meat, while Plains peoples such as the Sioux and Cheyenne ate it yet kept a religious taboo against wild canines. Hernán Cortés claimed that dogs bred for eating were sold in the markets of Tenochtitlan in 1519, though no other source backs him up. On the Lewis and Clark expedition, Meriwether Lewis and his men regularly ate dog, often bought from local tribes; his co-leader Clark is said to have refused it.
Religious law draws firm lines. Jewish dietary law excludes dogs because they neither chew cud nor have cloven hooves, and most Islamic schools forbid carnivores with fangs, although the Maliki school classes it as disliked rather than banned. In most of Europe it has been taboo except under siege or famine: Germans called it blockade mutton, Parisians ate dog during the 1870 to 1871 siege, and polar explorers leaned on it too, as Roald Amundsen planned from the start on his race to the South Pole.
In 2014 an estimated 25 million dogs a year were being eaten worldwide. The United States banned slaughtering dogs and cats for food on 20 December 2018, with an exception for Native American rituals.
Source: Dog meat
