It was with some relief that I learned that the Chinese government has instructed the 112 designated Olympic restaurants in Beijing to take dog meat off their menus during the games.

This means Occidental visitors to the Middle Kingdom will not have to make diligent inquiry to determine whether the meat in their stew is of canine origin. Miss Candi, our 13-year-old Peke-a-poo is a full-fledged member of our family, so to me, eating dog meat would be tantamount to cannibalism.

I remember sitting in a restaurant somewhere in mainland China and watching an officer of the People’s Liberation Army carrying a little dog affectionately in his arms as he walked across the dining area.

Spotting our table, he gave a friendly grin and said in fluent English, “This one got away from the cooks.” His government needs his sense of humor.

I’ve heard the urban legend about the American couple who took their small dog along with them on a tour of China. As the story goes, they took Fifi into a nice restaurant and, not wishing to be distracted during their dining experience, asked the waiter if he would take care of her. The waiter cheerfully agreed.

The couple enjoyed their meal of exotic Chinese cuisine. When the waiter brought the check, he also brought a small plate containing Fifi’s collar. But not Fifi who, it developed, had been the meal’s most delicious course.

Snopes, the respected online debunker of urban myths, debunked this one. So far as it could determine, the horror never happened, and similar tragedies are highly unlikely to happen in China. Which is not to say that the Chinese don’t eat dogs.

One of the things you quickly learn on a visit to China is the wide gulf between standards for ordinary Chinese and standards for foreign visitors. Miss Peggy and I shopped for luxuries at “friendship stores” that were off limits to native Chinese. We stayed in posh hotels where native Chinese were fenced out unless they worked there. It was eerie to walk into an upscale hotel in Xian and see the folks from the countryside lined up with faces pressed against the wrought-iron fence to get a glimpse of the wealthy Westerners.

The natives also dined at a different level. At a diesel-engine factory near Shanghai, we passed a worker’s cafeteria where lunch fare consisted of deep-fried chicken claws. In the meat section of a farmer’s market in Guangzhou, we saw several scrawny cats in cages.

Yet, the food served to foreign guests was generally quite tasty. I remember one breakfast that included marble-sized white balls that had a mild seafood taste. I learned afterward that they consisted of boiled eel. I had eaten battered and fried eel caught from a creek back home in South Carolina, and it tasted like catfish. So I wasn’t repulsed by the knowledge that I had eaten the stuff in China. I even found boiled pigeon eggs acceptable.

In Beijing, we enjoyed a meal of Peking duck. It was delicious until we came to the webbed feet. I dutifully took them between my chopsticks and ate them. They were flabby, but tasteless. Miss Peggy passed hers to me, and I cleaned my plate, as Mama taught me to do.

That was a long time ago, and China has made enormous strides since then. It has developed a middle class, which can afford some of the luxuries once accessible only to tourists from abroad.

The government has placed its ban on doggy food because it’s afraid dog on the menu will hurt China’s up-and-coming image. I’m glad for the sake of the doggies, though I don’t know why the Chinese are any more embarrassed over eating dogs than we are over eating pigs. Pigs, like dogs, are intelligent animals. Some people keep them as pets, though I can’t picture a pig lying on my bed and claiming squatter’s rights to Miss Peggy’s pillow the way Miss Candi does.

Patsy Boone, my friend from Whitsett, N.C., once told me about dining in a restaurant in France during a tour of Western Europe. There were dogs all over the place, she said, though none were on the menu. I believe that’s true. The French eat frogs, but not dogs. But the Gallic menu may feature the flesh of critters that are more suited to the plow than to the plate. You might want to examine closely the origin of the meat if you’re offered a “filly mignon.”

In our own beloved Southland, during the late unpleasantness of the 1860s, soldiers were driven to slaughtering their mules for food. Reports from that era indicate that the meat tasted a lot like venison — which makes sense when you think of the biological and gastronomical similarities between a mule and a deer.

Our Down Under cousins offer bush tucker, without embarrassment, to daring tourists. In certain eateries in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, you can order an appetizer of “witchety grubs,” which are about what they sound like. The aborigines love them, and maybe you will too. If you do, you may also go for the bat soup ladled out in Southeast Asia. Better bats than dogs.

As an old Southern boy, I’m plenty happy with the variety in my mama’s menu of pork, beef, poultry and fish. After a pleasant sojourn on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, I have gladly made room for crawfish, though I never got into sucking their heads. I draw the line at dogs, and if I ever return to the Chinese mainland, I will be careful to board Miss Candi somewhere on this side of the Pacific, despite all those assurances from Snopes.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@aol.com