Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall would be as happy eating puppies as pigs: does he have a point?

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has “sparked outrage” this week, according to the Daily Mail, with his suggestion that eating puppy meat is no worse than eating a pork chop.

Now, before dog lovers get too upset, he’s not suggesting that people start eating dog meat: rather, as a reformed-meat-eater-vegetarian, he’s suggesting that they should stop eating pork. He makes the fair point that eating pork is “an artificial construct of our society; a cultural decision to make pets out of dogs and meat out of pigs.”

His statements have caused upset in the animal welfare world, with animal charities issuing statements strongly disagreeing with him. But does he have a fair point? Should we, as a pig-eating country, shut up about dog-eating countries, just letting them get on with it?

The World Society for the Protection of Animals knows a lot about this subject. WSPA has been working with the South Korean dog meat industry since 1998, when it responded to complaints about the inhumane treatment of dogs and cats in Korean markets. WSPA is a responsible international organisation: if dog farming could be done humanely, the organisation would have put its cultural bias to one side and worked with local organisations for stronger dog welfare laws to protect the animals in the markets.

In the end, WSPA made the call to campaign for an outright ban on dog meat. The organisation came to the conclusion that it’s impossible for dogs to be farmed and slaughtered humanely, anywhere and in any situation.

Despite Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall’s contention, dogs are different to pigs. Pigs may not always have decent lives on farms, but with care, they can be farmed humanely. Dogs have not been bred for generations as farm animals; instead, they have been bred as social creatures and as companions to humans.

If you try to put dogs into farm-type conditions, it just doesn’t work: they suffer far more than traditional farm animals suffer. Dogs cannot live in artificially large, closely packed social groups without fear and intense aggression. The resulting chronic stress frequently results in stereotypic and other abnormal behaviours that are distressing to watch and must be highly distressing for the dogs to experience. Whereas pigs in many intensively reared situations may suffer similar stress, it is possible for pigs to be farmed in ways that do offer them lives worth living.

As Dr Les Sims of the Hong Kong Government Agriculture Fisheries and Conservation Department has stated, “No country in the world has developed a humane way of raising and slaughtering dogs, and in our opinion, it cannot be done”.

The reports released by WSPA about the nature of dog farming in South Korea certainly support this view; the severity and range of welfare issues are shocking, which is why WSPA is currently campaigning to end the dog meat industry in that country.

Some pigs do suffer in the production of pork; in contrast,  all the dogs involved in meat production suffer when dog meat is on the menu.