We have seen all of these for sale in the markets, so someone must be eating them. Also: eels, turtles, pigeons, frogs, slabs of fat, tongues, spanking clean, baby-pink pigs feet, and bony yellow chicken feet. The last is an especially popular snack food, which I find puzzling; how much can there be to eat on a chicken foot?

The alley that leads from our house to the neighborhood market appears to be the Kunming center for the production of charred pig hooves. Several times a week, we see men and women squatting next to bushels of severed limbs and individually roasting them with a blowtorch. I'm not sure I've ever actually seen a blowtorch before outside of a Roadrunner cartoon, and I never imagined that they could be used in a culinary preparation. Just remember, when they start showing up in Williams-Sonoma, that you heard it here first.

One delicacy that we have not seen for sale is dog, but don't think that that means you (or they) are safe. There is a restaurant specializing in dog not far from where we live. The sign out front has a profile of what could be someone's beloved Labrador retriever, and a naive observer could mistake the business for, let's say, a pet shop, or a kennel. But if a naive observer's wife can read Chinese, then the illusion vanishes.

I'm sure everyone reading this has their own reason for being horrified by the prospect of eating, or even cooking, dog. For me, the problem has to do with a dog's intelligence and awareness.

Most barnyard animals appear to be pretty dumb. Adding snakes/rats/bats/grubs to the discussion doesn't change the argument. I can't speak authoritatively about the actual intelligence of a cow or a pig, but I do know that they don't *look* very smart. And they certainly don't seem to be very aware that their fate is to end up on someone's dinner plate (or in someone's rice bowl.) I continue to be amazed by how calmly chickens accept being held upsidedown by the feet while being carried home from the market. I have seen them just as motionless dangling from the handlebars of a bike in traffic, or stuffed into plastic bags and bundled on a bike rack.

Now for all I know, the chickens are in a state of panic, and being still is an evolutionarily adapted technique for insuring their safety. Maybe. But it does not do a lot to evoke sympathy. Pigs, on the other hand, can squeal like the devil. Hearing them being dragged by the hind legs is unforgettable. This little piggy really does cry "wee wee wee" all the way home. Deb found the cries heartbreaking, but to my ears, it sounded like an overreaction. I mean, come on, you're just getting dragged around by the feet; it can't be *that* bad. I don't believe that the pig could have any premonition of the upcoming slaughter.

And then there are dogs. As I said, we have not seen them for sale in the market. But we did see something that was at least as grim. In a bus station, on top of the piles of cargo roped down on the roof of a long distance bus, were sacks of dogs. There were a dozen or more of them, crammed tightly together side by side, with only their heads poking out of the bags. The look of despair on their faces made me feel I was watching a trainload headed for Auschwitz. You don't see that in the face of a chicken.

We haven't figured out yet what the story is with cats. They're not in the market either, and we've never seen the kitty equivalent of the doggie restaurant, but I don't think they're on easy street. Sometimes we'll see a kitten curled up in a box, or on the floor of a shop. But invariably, they are bound at the neck with a short leash.

It's reasonable to think that they are being kept around to catch rodents. Considering the amount of trash that's strewn about, we see remarkably few rats. But I don't know if the credit goes to the cats or to the poison vendors that you'll find in any reasonably sized market. Their products are adorned with cartoony drawings of cats in police uniforms, which speaks to the cat's good reputation. Even Deng Xiaoping used cats as a metaphor when arguing for economic reform, saying that "A black cat or a white cat is a good cat, if it catches mice." (This has always struck me as the political equivalent of "they're all pink on the inside.")

But Deb has pointed out, we never see cats; we see kittens. Just tiny little fluff balls that probably couldn't even snag a mouse, never mind a rat. And how is a cat or kitten going to catch mice anyway if it's tied up on a leash? So maybe they're only being kept around long enough to get fattened up for serving. Or maybe they get set free to prowl at night, only to get tied up again in the daytime. It doesn't look like good life, either way.

All of this slaughter may sound cruel, but the only significant difference between what happens here, and what happens in the U.S. is that in China, you can see it. And there are some benefits to the system here. For one, food is uncannily fresh. It is not unusual, in a good restaurant, to pick out your meal from an assortment of living creatures, and then have the unlucky victim brought to the kitchen to be killed and cooked while you snack on appetizers.

But I think there are philosophical advantages too. The Chinese understand that actions have consequences, whether it is something as simple as eating a chicken or as monumental as damming the Yangtze River. It may not be pleasant to slit a bird's throat, or to displace thousands of people and flood acres of virgin landscape, but you can't always avoid the unpleasant. I have to admire the honesty of people who look their dinner in the eye before indulging in the pleasure of their meal.

There is a hard-nosed pragmatism here, the result, perhaps, of years of struggle and deprivation, but it is not cruelty. And in a dog-eat-dog world is people-eat-dog really so bad?