People Send Death Threats When They Find Out About My Dog Meat Farm. Here's What They're Missing.
I never imagined I’d farm dog meat.
I grew up in a rural area. By the time I was 6, I was fishing with my family. By 8, I’d started target practice, and by 12, I’d finished a hunter’s safety course in time to get my first deer tag.
I also always loved animals. I rescued mice from traps, birds from cats, and worms from puddles (and couldn’t bear to put them on hooks when I fished). And on that fateful first hunting trip, when the time came to shoot the deer, I couldn’t. I watched through the scope, and she was so pretty in the morning light. I could see her breath and wondered, “Why would I want this moment to end — for myself or for her?” I purposefully waited too long and missed the shot. I never went hunting again.
I wanted a job working with animals. First, I wanted to be a veterinarian, but I couldn’t handle blood. Then, I wanted to be a zoologist or a biologist, but I was bad at math and couldn’t dissect a cat in high school biology. My dad joked that if I could just find a job petting animals, I’d be set.
All this time, despite loving and wanting to work with animals, I ate meat without seeing any problem with it. Eating animals was normal — I mean, our family had an entire meat freezer. Everyone I knew ate meat.
Something that particularly consoled me about my choices was the 2006 BBC documentary about Temple Grandin, “The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow.” Grandin cites her autism as a capacity that allows her to identify with the experiences of non-human animals. She designs livestock handling facilities (i.e., slaughterhouses) and is renowned for her professed concern about the welfare of animals killed in them. (Today, close to half the cows slaughtered in North America travel through her designs.) I was so grateful that Grandin, who obviously cared about animals as much as I did, was out there ensuring that a cow’s “one bad day” was as smooth, painless, and without fear as possible.
It wasn’t until traveling abroad that I ever truly saw the animals that would end up on my plate: goats tied in front of restaurants, chickens in cages, fish in tanks. I found I was uncomfortable eating dishes that didn’t try to hide the animal involved: knee joints, feet, faces. I drew a crude line between animals that were OK to eat (pigeons) and ones that were not (frogs). One night, in full nihilism, I ate a basket of rabbit legs, prepared like chicken wings. When I did the math about how many bunnies I’d eaten, I felt unsettled.
Eventually, I even tried a bite of dog meat and was surprised. Not only did it taste just like every other animal, but... nothing happened. I’d broken the Western taboo, yet I didn’t feel any differently having eaten a dog than I had eating anything else.
But suddenly eating all animals felt different. I went vegetarian soon after returning home. I joked to my friends, “I’ve eaten all the animals. I’m done.”
Later, I discovered the animal welfare labels on eggs and dairy. I didn’t really know what “free-range,” “cage-free,” or “organic” really meant, but it seemed kinder. So I found The Egg Brand and The Milk Brand that made me feel good and bought those. One day, though, my free-range, small-farm, big-pastures, certified humane brown eggs (with the picture of a girl hugging a chicken) were sold out. I stood in front of the egg case, flummoxed.
Do I just not buy eggs? I wondered.
And I didn’t. I went home and made toast for breakfast. Soon after, I saw a video of male chicks in the egg industry going into a macerator. I spent all night googling why vegans don’t eat eggs or drink milk and, at age 33, I learned cows weren’t these magical creatures who just made too much milk. I learned they had to be pregnant and have a baby to produce milk.
So I went vegan. I didn’t expect it to stick — or want it to. I half-hoped it would be too hard, that the social pressures would be too much. But here we are, 8 1/2 years later, and I’m still vegan. And I’m finally working with animals.
Kind of.
In the summer of 2021, I started that dog meat farm I mentioned.
Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat is a satirical, small family farm that raises dogs for meat. I have a website and social media accounts, as well as flyers, business cards, and other materials to download. Vegans spread the word passively, leaving farm materials on bulletin boards, in cafés, and anywhere these materials may pique curiosity. Some host (mock) dog meat tastings (these have happened now around the world), and volunteers have created hyper-local dog meat farms in eight countries and counting (also all fake).
We market our dog meat products as local, organic, free-range, and humanely raised. Much of the content is drawn, word-for-word, from the websites and promotional materials of actual, similar farms — similar, but for the fact that they raise chickens, pigs and cows, for food, instead of dogs. Like those farms, our images are bucolic— rolling hills, golden-hour light, and happy animals frolicking. But, in our materials, the farmed animals are dogs.
Elwood’s content stays completely in character, and doesn’t reveal the farm’s agenda. The website, however, eventually mentions that Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat is satirical. Many people do not read that far — less than halfway down our homepage — even as they click the “Contact” button at the top of it. Many people think Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat farm is real, and, it turns out, even when dogs are raised and slaughtered in the most humane way possible, people don’t like it.
I receive countless hate emails and voicemails, including death threats.
“What kind of person do you have to be to openly slaughter dogs and eat them?” someone asked. People have requested that I “please kill [my]self,” and some callers “hope [I] get brutally murdered.”
Some people say racist things about other cultures — cultures that don’t try to hide the fact that animals are being eaten — or tell me to “go back to,” or that I’m “just as bad as people from” [insert country]. Some people place orders for our dog meat (whether because they think it’s real, or to show that we have not, in fact, owned them, I cannot say). Some people attack activists’ dog meat tasting tables. When I finally met my animal welfare hero, Temple Grandin, she tore up one of our brochures. Some people get mad when they learn I am a vegan and that the site is satire, as though I have punctured the denial that allowed them to love dogs and eat chickens in peace.
The message of Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat has traveled far and wide. Within a month of our website going up, the “farm” went viral. We’ve had 3.9 million unique website visitors since our launch. Our Facebook posts reached 1.1 million in September, and 10.4 million in the last year.
In the U.S., the mere idea of eating dogs is so provocative, it is at best unbelievable and at worst horrifying. But most of us think nothing of eating other animals.
Elwood’s isn’t meant to vilify family farms. But it is meant to make people think — to feel unsettled, and figure out why. For those who do read past the introduction of Elwood’s homepage, we ask them to think about the kinds of claims that are often used to mollify concerns about killing and eating other animals:
All of this experience with Elwood’s made me especially intrigued by the fallout from Donald Trump’s claim, during last month’s presidential debate, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are “eating the dogs... eating the cats.” Despite questions about a host of hot button issues — from abortion and the war in the Middle East, to the economy, gun control, the Supreme Court, and democracy itself — no portion of the debate garnered as much attention, prompted as many opinion pieces, or hatched as many memes as Trump’s claim.
Elwood’s definitely had a response to this.
From the left and the center, we saw widespread condemnation of a claim many see as xenophobic and racist, a vile trope with roots in the gravest historical atrocities (not to mention fact-checking, confirming that there is no evidence of pets in Springfield being abducted and eaten). From the right, a doubling down on the claim itself, and even an admission by Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance that he was “creating stories” to draw attention to what he and the MAGA right see as the overall problem of immigrants — the point of the dog-and-cat-eating claim being that immigrants violate cultural norms, are different from “real Americans,” and generally don’t belong. From persons unknown (though presumably people who believe the claim that cats and dogs are being eaten), there were bomb threats, locked-down hospitals, evacuated schools, and hate, threats and harassment that some Haitian residents of Springfield say has caused them to live in fear.
Across the political spectrum, the idea that dogs and cats are being eaten is so outlandish, so horrific — in the words of Vice President Harris, “so extreme” — whether you believe the veracity of the claim or not, the alleged behavior is beyond the pale. But tens of billions of animals other than dogs die for food in the U.S. every year, and barely anyone bats an eye.
Now that the horrors of factory farming have been revealed repeatedly for decades, some minor reforms are being implemented. While these reforms are far too little — even the strongest welfare laws, such as such as California’s law Proposition 12, which bans extreme confinement, still allow for treatment that amounts to torture under any definition of the word — and, for billions and billions of animals, far, far too late, they do reflect changing values. The hope seems to be that we can eliminate what we don’t like about animal agriculture — hurting animals — and keep what we do — being able to eat them, without feeling badly about it.
But when you say you’re raising dogs for meat instead of other, more traditionally farmed animals — or that residents of a small city are eating them — it immediately reframes things. Every aspect of animal agriculture suddenly comes into clear focus. Not just the well-known horrors of factory farming, but also the sheer fact of killing animals in order to eat them (reread that as “dogs” for the full effect). Slaughter, a practice we’d previously shook our heads at sadly and thought, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ becomes an atrocity. When applied to dogs, humane washing like “free-range” or “cage-free,” or the concept of “one bad day” are clearly preposterous. Why should we accept them when it comes to other animals?
My hope with Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat is that it acts as a mirror, reflecting back to us the mental gymnastics we must go through to justify our actions toward farmed animals — animals who are the same as our pets in all the ways that matter, with the capacity to think, feel, emote, dream and connect, both with one another and with humans. Farmers are not the villains in this story, and neither are meat eaters. The villain is the social and psychological denial we must engage in to continue exploiting animals against our better moral judgment.
Ninety-nine percent farmed animals in the U.S. suffer on factory farms. But even in the fantasy world where we could change that and still feed meat to hundreds of millions people (NB: we can’t), we are never going to create an animal farm where slaughter doesn’t happen. That’s called an animal sanctuary.
My intent with Elwood is to be kind. To allow people to have an experience that allows them to think deeply about eating animals — dogs, chickens, cows, all animals — without feeling publicly called out. To simply see a post, or a poster, a billboard, or a bumper sticker, and to go through the shock, confusion, deep thought and resolution that allows them to ask why it’s not OK to eat dogs, however humanely raised, but is OK to kill and eat so many other animals. I want there to be release and relief at the end of someone’s encounter with Elwood’s — release from the belief that we must kill and eat animals, and relief to learn that we don’t have to eat animals anymore.
Not every person who contacts Elwood’s does so to yell at or threaten us. Sometimes Elwood’s prompts people to think about their own food choices. In the wake of a viral moment with Trump and Vance, we can all do the same thing — if we are willing to think about why eating dogs seems shocking and cruel, while eating other animals seems natural and normal. Whether we’re eating dogs, or eating chickens, or pigs, or cows — there may not be a right way to do the wrong thing.
Molly Elwood is a copywriter, writer, and creator of Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat. Elwood’s is a satirical, comprehensive and wickedly effective social media phenomenon, bringing attention to the animals on our plate by pretending to eat the animals we love. What began as a grassroots movement designed to provoke a conversation about how we treat animals is now creating meaningful and tangible social change worldwide. Learn more at ElwoodDogMeat.com.
Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at pitch@huffpost.com.
