Growing up at the end of the nineteenth century, my mother’s parents believed that German immigrants ground up dogs and cats to make sausages.
At that time, there was a large German immigrant community in Cincinnati, where they lived. (A neighborhood, in that city, is called Over The Rhine.) My grandparents were not German, but they were required to learn the language in school, and to learn about German culture. Perhaps it isn’t that surprising that they didn’t like Germans very much.
Of course, the city’s German population weren’t making sausages out of household pets. That was an urban myth. It’s a myth that has had a number of incarnations.
In the eighties, as waves of Asian immigrants were coming to this country, there were rumors that the meat in Chinese and Indian restaurants came from dogs and cats. I knew people who wouldn’t eat in Asian restaurants, because they were sure they’d be eating dog.
The story was even featured on “Hill Street Blues.”, a very popular TV series.
Dogs and cats are eaten in China, as are snakes, and assorted other creatures most of us wouldn’t want to think about ingesting.
However, think about it for a minute. First you have to catch the animal. Have you ever tried to catch a dog? They’re fast. Cats are faster and they climb.
Assuming you have caught the animal, you’re going to have to kill it, and it will fight like hell. I bear scars from the last time my ninja cat sneaked out, and I caught him and brought him inside.
Now, you have to skin it and clean it. Then you have to dispose of the parts you don’t eat. It’s going to be difficult and messy.
(If the cops catch you doing any of this, you’re going to be arrested, and the judge is going to throw the book at you. Nobody likes animal abusers. They will also shut down your restaurant, and take away your license.)
Or you can go to a wholesale butcher’s and pick up a piece of pork, ready to be turned into mushu.
Which would you choose?
You are a Haitian in Springfield, Ohio. Are you going to try to sneak into someone’s yard, and steal their schnoodle? Or are you going to head to WalMart and either buy or boost a pot roast?
Pot roasts don’t bite.
There are any number of urban myths out there, about various immigrant communities. They’ve been around as long as there have been immigrant communities.
Most of them are ugly lies, created to make the foreigners seem less human than “real” Americans.
The internet is a wonderful place to spread any kind of evil falsehood. That’s why you should check anything you see online.
Germans didn’t make sausages out of dogs. Chinese didn’t cook cats. Haitians aren’t eating their neighbors’ pets.
Anyone running for president of the United States should know better than to repeat an urban legend.
