DOGS OF CHINA AND JAPAN 



admired sucking whelps, and sacrificed them to their divinities. 

 The Romans thought them a supper in which the gods 

 themselves delighted." * 



Professor Boyd Dawkins, delving still deeper into the past, 

 found evidence of the use of dogs '-flesh among the cave- 

 dwellers of Britain itself, and remarks that the large percentage 

 of fractured bones of puppies implies that they found especial 

 culinary favour among our prehistoric ancestors, f 



In Corea dog-flesh was on sale among the common butchers' 

 meats, and enjoyed by the people, in 1882. In the first 

 month of the year, however, owing to religious scruples, no 

 dog-meat was eaten. GrifHs states that the people of Kokorai, I 

 from whom the Coreans are descended, held dogs in con- 

 siderable honour and named their rulers after the domestic 

 beasts, the horse, the ox, and the dog, etc. In Japan dogs are 

 held in very little honour except the " chin " or Japanese 

 spaniel . It is a remarkable fact that though the Chinese 

 and Corean partiality for dog-flesh has been noted by almost 

 every close observer of their customs from early times, the 

 Japanese appear never within historic times to have eaten 

 this meat. In the light of the theory that the early Japanese 

 were derived from two swarms of colonists both coming from 

 Siberia, the first cave-dwellers and the second the Ainu, who 

 used stone implements, the following remarks by Perry || 

 are of considerable interest, as they seem to suggest absence 

 of the influence of megalithic culture, which appears to have 

 tended to restrain from the use of canine flesh, from early 

 Chinese development. " Several facts go to show that the 

 whole group of notions concerning the relationship between 



* Rees's" Cyclopaedia," vol. xii, " Dog," 1819. 

 f Boyd Dawkins, " Cave Hunting." 



j " Corea: the Hermit Nation," Griffis, 1882, p. 267. Ibid., p. 52. 

 || " The Megalithic Culture of Indonesia," Manchester University Press, 1918, 

 chap. xx. 



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