Barometer: Who eats dogs?

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.

— While dogs are widely reported to have been eaten in Europe in the second world war, the Tages Anzeiger newspaper in Switzerland reported in January that farming communities around Appenzell and St Gallen still consume a dish called mostbröckli made of marinaded dog — legal in the country so long as they do not breed the dogs for consumption. Beef is often substituted.

Wage wars

Labour proposed tax rebates for companies which pay a ‘living wage’. How does Britain compare with other countries in our national minimum wage? These are the seven most generous countries, as measured in ‘Purchasing Power Standards’ — an imaginary monetary unit which takes account of prices in different countries.

Many social democratic countries, including Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland, have no minimum wage.
Source: Eurostat

On cameras

Tesco was reported to be developing facial-recognition cameras which can read faces in order to target shoppers with advertising.