“No photo. No photo,” the lady who serves BBQ’d dog with blood sausages literally around the corner from our apartment in Hanoi kindly requested. And we respected this request. But the photo here that I found on the internet is, very likely, of the same lady. This lady, I hasten to add, is decidedly not evil. My impression of her is that she’s a nice lady who didn’t so much as raise her voice even a little bit and who simply prefers to not have photos of her operation taken by American tourists. The misunderstanding is understandable. How could she know we’re not tourists? She hasn’t read the Southeast Asia Escape Plan.

BBQing and serving non-fluffy dogs doesn’t make her evil either. Not in my book, anyway. In fact, it’s pretty clear that she’s running a snout to tail operation here—she’s got snouts, tails, and blood sausage—which ought to make the people who appreciate the “we use the whole animal”-type restaurants very appreciative, indeed. The BBQ’d dog situation is a full-on back-to-the-land animal husbandry and butchery and restaurant preparation-type of situation. It’s dog farm to table dining. And it looks delicious. BBQ’d dogs look like the most succulent roasted suckling pigs, except that the tail and teeth situation gives them away. And who wants to eat pork all the time, anyway? According to our lovely native informant, Miracle, the flavor of non-fluffy dog is a nice change of pace from pork.

And don’t even start with the morality. Here’s the truth about what we eat: Humans are omnivores. We eat everything. Unless there’s a better use for an animal or a more convenient alternative, we eat it. The reason we don’t eat non-fluffy dogs and instead feed them expensive dog food from the local expensive dog food boutique and dress them up in silly clothes and push them around in strollers, etc., isn’t just because we’ve lost our minds. It’s because we’ve got lots of cattle in the USA, just standing around, chewing the cud, if you will, practically begging to be turned into steaks. Forget about your bullshit morality. Ever seen the inside of a factory farm? Not bloody likely. That’s cuz the conditions of the non-fluffy animals in American factory farms are so appalling, they don’t let people near ’em. So we can knock it off with the whole “poor non-fluffy dogs” business. If the United States had a long history of food insecurity and malnutrition instead of cattle ranching and chicken raising, we’d be eating non-fluffy dogs too. Guaranteed.

Bon appétit.