The Spectator

Barometer: Who eats dogs?

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issue 09 November 2013

Dog’s dinner

A Canadian hiker rescued in Quebec was reported to have killed and eaten his German shepherd dog in spite of it having saved him from a bear. Who else, outside Southeast Asia, has survived on dog?

— Ernest Shackleton and his party in the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-17 were forced to eat their dogs after their ship Endurance was crushed by ice.

— It was a deliberate tactic of Roald Amundsen gradually to reduce the size of his dog pack by killing them one at a time and feeding them to the rest of the pack. The men, too, ate the odd ‘delicate filet’.

— Douglas Mawson and Xavier Mertz were forced to eat their dogs after a fellow party member disappeared with their food supply on an expedition to survey George V Land in 1912. Mertz died from an overdose of vitamin A after eating dog’s liver.

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