THE NEXT MORNING—THE day before Lunar New Year's Eve—the dog vendors in a downtown market are doing a brisk business as they clear out their supplies in a rush. The market sells just about everything that lives or was once alive: hair combs made of water buffalo horn, squid, fresh pigs' noses, cages full of ornamental songbirds. I'm here with a translator I've hired for the day, Cham, whose leg was severely injured while fighting in the "American War." I asked him to take me to the market because I've been feeling like the culinary equivalent of a trophy hunter who goes to Africa and shoots the first zebra he's ever laid eyes on. I came to Vietnam thinking that I could overcome my own culture's culinary prejudices, but I've managed only to turn tail and run. My mistake, I realized, was that I've been trying to eat dog without first understanding where it comes from. If I knew that, I might be able to give up my association between the dogs on my plate and the dogs that have shared my home.

Cham leads me down a long stall covered by a tattered collection of low-strung tarps. Dogs hang above wooden benches that line each side of the stall, eviscerated but otherwise intact. They're classic mutts, Heinz 57's, the kind of dogs you see wandering city streets in Mexico: long, upward-curling tails, steeply pitched foreheads, medium size. The hair has been singed off with a propane torch, leaving the skin as golden brown as a Thanksgiving turkey in a commercial. Teenage girls wearing skirts and dresses are butchering the dogs into manageable cuts.

Customers, all women, pick through the pieces as fast as the girls can cut them. "How much money for a whole dog, head and all?" I ask. An elderly woman weighs one of the dogs on a hanging scale, taps out some figures on a calculator, and gives me a price of 900,000 dong (about $55) for a 22-pound dog. Cham assures me that this is about twice the local rate. "Not a friendly price," he says.

As we walk out, we pass a woman selling live, fluffy puppies out of a cage.

"Is that for people who like to raise their own meat?" I ask.

"No, not meat dogs," Cham says. "For pets."

"What's the difference?"

"The difference?" Cham shrugs. "The customer buy these for a pet dog, not a meat dog."

Cham tells me he has a dog at home.

"Is your family going to eat him?" I ask.

"No, no. This is pet. My family does not eat dog."

A few days later, Peter's wife, Mai, helps me track down a dog wholesaler named Dung, in Hanoi's Hoang Mai district. Dung explains that he buys dogs from small farmers in the countryside, usually paying the equivalent of about 70 cents per pound of live dog. He prefers dogs that are one year old, weighing about 20 pounds. He fattens the animals by feeding them beef stomach, then kills them with a sharp blow to the head—the same method used by many American livestock slaughterhouses. Once they're dehaired and gutted, Dung's dogs are sold to local restaurants at a 60 percent markup. He moves about 1,000 annually, selling more during the run-up to Tet than in all the rest of the year.

Since it's almost the beginning of the New Year, he doesn't have any dogs in stock except for a young pooch that's tied to a rope. I ask Dung's wife if someone is going to eat the dog. She tells me that Dung bought it from a farmer as part of a load of meat dogs, but it was such a nice puppy that they decided to wait and see how it was around the kids. If it's good and doesn't bite, it will be their pet. If not, the dog will get fattened up and sold.