Bad news for lazy dog eaters. One of China’s biggest food delivery companies won’t deliver dog meat to your door anymore. Ele.me (that's this one) decided last week to take all dog meat dishes off its app and bar hundreds of restaurants from selling dog. The reason? Nothing to do with morals or tradition. Instead, they have found a novel way to justify the move: food safety.

*** In a statement, the company says that it’s not making a moral judgment. Instead, it points out a pretty obvious but disturbing fact: There are no official dog slaughterhouses in China. Even if you’d made your own personal peace with the issue, and decided eating dog is not a big deal, there is no way to tell where the meat came from and no assurance that what ends up on your plate wasn’t infected with rabies or infested with parasites. There’s no quarantine system, says Ele.me, so apart from all that ethical and emotional stuff, you are kind of rolling the food safety dice. They don’t want to be the company that delivers rabies to your door. To that end, they have removed 294 restaurants from their platform and more than 7,700 dishes. That’s a drop in the bucket – Ele.me is in more than 1,100 cities and has about 3.5 million other dishes listed – but hey, even one less delivery of rabies is a step in the right direction. For the record, no restaurants in Shanghai were barred but 146 dishes were taken off of restaurant delivery menus. Before the ban, the most popular dish was dog hot pot. The company says the next step is screening out cat meat, snake meat and snake bile.