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Canine. It’s what’s for dinner.

We pride ourselves on our devotion to the principle of equality here in the United States, so it’s time to put our values where our mouths are, so to speak. Pigs, chickens, cows, and the like already endure abject suffering so we can consume their flesh, so it is only fair that we include “man’s best friend.” How could they better prove their deep loyalty to us than by sacrificing their lives to feed us?

There is plenty of room on our plates to accommodate a few slices of Lassie. Even here in our resource-hog of a nation people experience hunger. Why not run a hundred million or so Rovers through the meat industrial complex each year? We have no reservations about torturing and slaughtering billions of other sentient beings to satiate our lust for meat. Research has indicated that pigs are actually more intelligent than dogs and thus would be more conscious of their misery. So there is no valid moral objection.

Our capacity to immunize ourselves from conscience and compassion as we greedily devour the flesh of non-human animals (who experienced pain beyond the scope of our imaginations so that we might savor their cooked remains) will serve us well if we implement this solution to the problem of hunger (both here and abroad). In some nations, dog meat is already prized as a delicacy, so we’d be in for a real treat!

Being the good little capitalists that we are, we need to determine the most profitable means to deliver “dog food” to our tables. After all, we are all about the “freedom” to generate profit and protect our sacrosanct property rights. We do manage to slightly conceal our greed and selfishness with a thin veneer of faux compassion—hence our “helping solve world hunger” rationale. Yet we know that ultimately the dogs we butcher will simply be another means to enhance the wealth of the power elite so that the excess can trickle down to the rest of us.

Obviously, the “good folks” running Tyson and Smithfield Foods will need a large infusion of canines to seed the factory farms they will construct to begin mass production and distribution of dog meat. A federal law requiring dog owners to sell their pets to these benevolent corporate entities at a fair price, a strident effort to capture strays, and emptying animal shelters will certainly give them the “livestock” they need to ramp up production to please our palates. Since consumers will be the ultimate beneficiaries of this wonderful addition to our culinary choices, it will make sense to use federal tax dollars to subsidize our meat packers’ acquisition of their initial stock AND their construction of the facilities necessary to add such a delicious addition to our menus.

Fast food restaurants, the progenitors and principal beneficiaries of factory farming, need to get on board with our newest source of meat very quickly. It will be essential that McDonald’s roll out something along the lines of a McBark at the very early stages of this endeavor. Burger King’s version might be called the Whoofer. Branding issues aside, the shock troops of the animal flesh consumption industry will need to divert their formidable resources toward selling consumers on eating their former companions.

Once we have the dogs and factory farms in place, we will need to implement the actual logistics of breeding, raising, and slaughtering our former pets and future meals. Since dogs are intellectually superior to cattle yet slightly inferior to pigs, perhaps we would be wise to model our canine processing system after the pork industry.

We will need to keep large numbers of bitches in a state of near perpetual pregnancy. To keep costs low, we will want to cram as many of these mother dogs into as small a space as possible. They don’t need to turn around or even move really. As long as we supply them with a cheap source of food (i.e. ground-up waste product from the slaughter house floor—theirs will truly be a “dog eat dog world”), water, and heavy doses of antibiotics, they will remain fertile enough to yield substantial numbers of pups and healthy enough to eat later.

Given their intellect, the dogs will probably suffer similar mental disturbances as pigs do in such confined quarters, which means they will become dangerously aggressive and a threat to themselves and others. Hence we will need to remove their teeth. Anesthetizing them would create an unnecessary expense, so we will simply put them in restraints, yank out their choppers, and cauterize them to stop the bleeding and prevent infection.

If our dogs (male and female alike) suffer wounds in their miniscule holding pens whilst they await their turn to fill our stomachs, we won’t waste time or money tending to them. Pigs suffer through the loss of body parts, broken legs, and ulcerated wounds, so there’s no reason to increase our costs by tending to the injured. A certain percentage of our stock will die, but they will provide fodder for the survivors. The stench emanating from the cankerous sores, feces, urine, and rotting corpses will be immense, but like their brethren pigs who also have highly developed senses of smell, the dogs will simply need to live with the fetid air and pneumonia they develop. As human beings, our desires for meat and profit preclude the possibility of ending the unnecessary suffering we inflict upon sentient creatures.

Once a dog has been appropriately aged and fattened to maximize taste and profit, we will load it onto a ventilated truck packed with as many dogs as possible without causing significant numbers of deaths by trampling or asphyxiation. Handlers will be trained to beat uncooperative dogs into submission with heavy steel rods. Or for those workers who have “bleeding hearts,” they can humanely stick electric cattle prods into the dogs’ rectums.

Upon arrival at the slaughter facility, the dogs who haven’t frozen to death or died of heat exhaustion, thirst, or suffocation will be man-handled off the truck (so as to keep them submissive) and forced to the kill floor. “Downers” (dogs too injured or sick to walk) will be dragged to their deaths. Euthanizing dying dogs will be out of the question because then we could not legally sell their flesh for consumption.

Ridiculous animal welfare laws will require that we stun the dogs before we kill them, but there is no legal mandate that we make certain they are unconscious. As with pigs, many dogs will probably remain conscious as they are scalded to death in the tanks that will soften their skin and remove their fur (or they may feel the searing pain of the blow torch if we opt to go that route to remove their hair).

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