So this happens when self-loving idiots flood the internet

Best friend or side dish.  Facebook investigates.

   From Puerto Rico to Saipan, Point Barrow to the Florida Keys, Americans love their dogs.  And increasingly, they love the taste of them.

   What once was confined to illicit recipes exchanged over the dark web, or word-of-mouth secret Soho pop-ups focused on dog-based tastings, has now gone mainstream, with Blue Apron including “Glazed Schnauzer” among its latest Amazon offerings, and Guy Fieri, host of the popular foodie series “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives”, praising, rather than shunning, restaurants that feature dog meat on the menu.

   Yahoo Sports recently posted a ranking of the top five dog breeds according to flavor.  Not surprisingly, this list closely matched the most popular breeds as determined from sales numbers provided by national pet-store chains.   

   Poodles and poodle mixes sit atop both lists, and some speculate the increased cross-breeding of poodles with other toy dogs is not simply a practical decision, necessary to extend the duration of cuteness and thus the shelf-lives of poodle puppies in these stores, but rather an attempt to blend out some of the gamier taste that comes from poodles’ insistence on consuming their own feces.  

   “I like big butts and I cannot lie,” said 15-year-old aspiring rapper Jim “Rapey” Hoover, apropos of nothing, although he may have been echoing the younger generation’s increasing appetite for tender flank steaks harvested from farm-raised labs and retrievers.  Increasingly, Kickstarter has become the platform utilized by Gen Xers to raise the funds necessary to obtain the acreage required for large-scale dog ranching operations.  Others, however, see this as distinctly old school.  

   “All of this so-called “latest trend” can be traced back to Captain James Cook’s 18th century voyages to Tahiti and the Sandwich Islands,” intoned Lord Flibber McGee Fallriverham, Dean of Stuffiness and Dry Heaves at Trinity College.

   “In fact, King George III’s first question to Cook upon his return to England in 1775, ‘Did you eat the hot dog?’ was not only the origin of the name for this popular convenience store staple (which didn’t originally contain any dog, but rather varying ratios of pork, carp, rat, rat droppings, and hair), but also the sole exchange between monarch and subject over the last 400 years comprised entirely of three-letter words, as Cook, obviously, answered an emphatic ‘Yes.’”

  Consumption is increasingly the choice of couples like Shawn and Dee Janes, residents of the tony Fox Run subdivision outside El Dorado, Arkansas.  “We looked at all the money we’d spent on organic, grain-free dog food the past seven years, all the Bark Box toys and treats,” Shawn said, “and then we weighed it against the appreciation we’d gotten back via shredded Dooney & Bourke purses, ruined Crane & Canopy throws, shams and 500-thread count bedsheets, plus our now pee-drenched suede Kivik sectional the housekeeper simply cannot get clean, and after about the nanny’s third trip to the animal ER for stomach pumping, since this loathsome creature continues to still somehow find my mistresses’ and my wife’s spin coaches’ prescription pain meds, chewing though the caps and ingesting them all, she finally just looked at me and said, ‘Fire up the grill.’  Seriously.  Not, ‘Who’s that Mexican dog guy who can make us famous?” but ‘Let’s eat!’  On the one hand, what an incredible breakthrough, because we've lived on carrot and asparagus juicees for the  past six months, but on the other hand, whoa.  Of course, I immediately told her that was crazy, we couldn’t just do this spur of the moment, we needed to consider other options, talk things over.  It was important to decide whether we wanted to use an overnight marinade, or just go with a dry rub.”

  

   Yet some of this behavior is clearly not a choice, or rather, it becomes a choice of survival.

 

   “Part of what we’re witnessing, or at least hearing, taking place outside San Juan is obviously need-based,” admitted one FEMA staffer, caught between flights, “but, I mean, honestly, taste this.  You don’t need a Cat5 hurricane to provide a reason to enjoy delicious terrier-stuffed street tacos.”     

   While some question the depravity of eating creatures domesticated over centuries to serve humans [indeed, what’s next – cows? -Ed.], not be served to them, overweight septuagenarian Jennifer Knott is more pragmatic.  “Lordy, I know if I die alone and my body isn’t discovered for weeks, that beast over there is eventually going to get hungry enough to bite into me,” Knott yelled, jabbing a cane threateningly at her one-eyed rescue pug collapsed and panting beside a giant flat-screen Oprah, also on nasal oxygen.  “I just figure circle of life, one less shitty Meals on Wheels meatloaf slab to microwave, God helps them what help themselves, Hakuna Montana, all that crap…”  

Correction:  This article did not originally appear “in its entirety” in the Saturday, September 30 weekend edition of USAToday.