Now this is a dog story!

The Society editor brought me her section to look over today 8/8 and I was not happy to see that the leading piece of art on the main story was a cute puppy on a patterned floor. Society is about people not animals, I began my usual rant against dog stories. How is this puppy NEWS?

It's a good story, the editor insisted. It seems that cancer patients around the city of Bejara are wild to get puppies. For guide dogs when they are weakened or bed-ridden? I asked. No, for food.

What?

You eat puppy meat over the course of a week and you will get better, she said. They talked to a doctor who agreed that weird as it seemed, yes, he'd seen the proof.

Oh, get out, I said. No, "We are becoming Chinese," she said.

And so if you have cancer you cut up a puppy like this and eat it? That is really happening? I asked.

Well, she admitted, cancer-prescription puppies have to be newborns, hairless, closed-eyed little babies who have not yet sampled their mother's microbe-laced milk. The dog in the picture was a fluffy pet beyond its cancer-curing days.

I worry that this article will be the Algerian dog-world equivalent of Herod's decree against little boys.