| Vietnamese eat dog meat to mark end of lunar month |
HANOI At a packed Hanoi restaurant, one of Vietnam’s growing ranks of proud pooch owners tucks into a traditional delicacy to mark the end of the lunar month - a plate of juicy dog.
Canine meat has long been on the menu in Vietnam. But now a growing love of the four-legged friends means that one man’s pet can be another’s dog sausage - quite literally as far as dog bandits are concerned.
“We never kill our own dogs for their meat. Here I’m eating in a restaurant so I don’t care which dogs they killed or how,” Pham Dang Tien, 53, said as he chewed contentedly on a plate of boiled dog.
Dog meat is good for health and virility, believes Tien, who sees no contradiction between these monthly meat binges and owning a dog - his family have had a string of beloved pet pooches over the course of 20 years.
For many older Vietnamese, dogs are an essential part of traditional Vietnamese cuisine that can coexist with pet ownership. Those dogs that end up on the dinner table are traditionally beaten to death.
Although the value of the thefts - dog meat fetches around $6 per kilo - is too low to concern the Vietnamese police, the loss of a treasured pet to the cooking pot means emotions run high.
Typically, Vietnamese “eat dog meat at the end of the lunar month to get rid of bad luck. That’s what business people often do”, said 30-year-old Giang, a specialist dog meat chef.
Agence France-Presse
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