Long ago, when the man in the hat was younger, a boy, he was prescribed a therapy of drugs to curb his appetite for running round aimlessly in circles. He did so, darting in and out and around objects, many of which we put in his way to prevent him from whetting his appetite for running in circles, his tongue slapping the side of is face, his eyes tightly closed. He claimed that running in circles made him feel at ease, lessening the horrible anxiety that he was prone to and experienced without end day in and day out. His parents, under the doctor’s supervision, decided that wearing a hat (not a straw cowboy hat with a drawstring around the chin, or a sharp sounding whistle, but a man’s hat) might stop their son from his frenzied running in circles. Thus began the man in the hat’s disposition for wearing a hat, long after his running in circles had stopped. It might be suggested, perhaps, that there is a connection to be drawn between wearing a hat, one inappropriate for a young boy, and the eating of dog meat in later life. I see no reason why this might not be the case, given the vagaries of life and the backwardness of psychiatry and insipidly bad parenting. A gestalt of images, some half, others mixed together to form a montage of likeness and facsimiles of likeness’, combined to confuse and addle the child in the hat. A partnership between a child’s building blocks and a shaman’s trickery, a slight of hand done in the open. The man in the hat, seeing no viable way out of the dupery at hand, simply gave into the therapy, learning in the process to disassociate reality from thought, sophistry from authenticity, sorcery from truthfulness. In this manner eating dog seemed neither extraordinary nor immoral, nor, for that matter, unseemly or horrifying. Meat is meat, after all, regardless of ancestry or breeding. Self-reflection, he was told, is the hallmark of humans, what differentiates a thinking thing from a reactive or non-self-conscious thing. A dog, for example, doesn’t reflect on what it is about to devour, but simply gnaws it into bite size smithereens. Eating a dog, then, is nothing more than a natural reaction to hunger, and one’s self-consciousness of that hunger. Broiled, spitted, slow-cooked over an open fire, skewered, stir-fried or baked, it’s all the same, meat. Carnivore, omnivore, glutton or epicure, the end result is the same, satisfying the want for food.
