Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese dog chefs are adamant that torture and pain makes the meat taste better. Chinese dog farmers, who cross breed St. Bernards exclusively for meat, cut the pads off their feet and leave them to bleed to death. “It takes about 10 to 15 minutes to die,” says Mr Shou, who breeds St. Bernards, known locally as ‘Big Dumb Dogs’ in Changping, China, “but the meat tastes better.” My Lao colleagues tell me that the Vietnamese sometimes insert a funnel into the dog’s mouth or anus, and pour in boiling water to kill and purge it at the same time.

Few people want to pay to have dogs neutered or vaccinated against diseases such as rabies, which is still a major problem in Asia, leaving heaps of scabby soi (street) dogs deemed a public health and safety menace. Yet the dog meat trade does not fix the problem, it just transmogrifies it into edible public health risks.

The risk is so real that earlier this year, the Provincial Health Office Chief Patricia Trabado told Filipinos to stop eating dog after ten people were admitted to a rabies bite centre for observation. Laos is known to have large and active pockets of trichinellosis from the roundworm (Trichinella spiralis), which is very common in Asia – and found most commonly in dogs. After eating infected meat, the happily replete diner may develop nausea, dyspepsia and diarrhoea, most often misdiagnosed as gastroenteritis. The worms travel to other parts of the body such as brain, lungs and heart, causing headaches, fever, cough, joint pains and itching. In extreme cases, respiratory or cardiac arrest can be the untreated outcomes. The disease is linked directly to clandestine trade in wild animals like feral pigs, dogs and cats for meat.