Eating Dogs

First: barring some dire need I don't see a reason to. That said, it's very odd to see how worked up people get (article: meh, comments: an insight into souls) about one kind of diet or other. It would be different if the people who are so strongly opposed to eating dogs were equally opposed to eating pigs, and some most likely are.

For anyone who really wants to try and get at a moralistic stance regarding what type of animal meat comes from there are ways to do so, and they are related to sustainability and efficiency. Unfortunately we eat too much meat in the US to deal with sustainability right now, and the one thing we should do is eat less of it. Still, there are differences between animals. In general, the higher up the food chain you go, the less efficient the meat you produce. This is why farmed salmon are bad--you have to feed them other fish--while farmed vegetarian tilapia are good.

With mammals, herbivores like cattle, sheep, goats, horses and deer do a remarkable thing for us: they convert food--greens like grass and most leaves--that we cannot digest into food--meat--that we can. Some omnivores, like pigs, can perform another complimentary task: they convert waste that we cannot extract nutrition from into meat that we can. Dogs cannot perform these functions and neither can any completely carnivorous animal (e.g. cats). Dogs essentially eat the same food we do, so raising them for meat is counter-productive.

So there is a sustainability/efficiency argument against eating dogs that will let you happily continue to gnaw the flesh off a pig's rib bone (as I, myself, am inclined to do). Of course, this is pretty much ignoring that we do not produce beef and pork in this sustainable fashion. While these animals are fed foods we cannot digest, they are also loaded up on corn that we can digest (maybe even better than cattle can). This is where I come back to saying that we eat too much meat.