I was walking the streets of Yinchuan (Ningxia P.) and the sight of a full-grown Husky dog caught my eye. The couple who just bought him were trying to get him to join them on their moped, and it was a perfectly normal thing to see 2 people and a Husky riding a moped.
I had stumbled upon a marketplace for dogs--purebreds--and was wondering if pure-breds are tastier than mutts. Or if eating a purebred was a silly statusism--a disease which sometimes appears to be the entirety of American culture.
"This is just a pet market," I told myself. "Here are some fish for sale--too small to eat. Aren't they? These caged birds scarcely have any meat on them. They are for singing--aren't they? And all these turtles--they are first-pets for kids--aren't they? Aren't they?"
I was reassured by a store that sold dog food, but then we fatten cows before we eat them, don't we? And there was that bucket of guts I passed on the way in.
"Different countries, different customs," as Peachie says in Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King.
And, as Danny likes to say in same: "God's Holy Trousers."
