Hot Dog?

So this is a pretty obvious question. Why is it called a hot dog? I'm told that there are some gross things that get put into the hot dog, but I've never been told it was actual dog. I assume the history of this food is pretty disgusting since I come from a place where dogs are closer to family members than they are to food. But even if original hot dogs were made from dog meat why do we still call them that when I'm sure its been over a century since someone in North America considered eating dog meat for nutrition. Maybe we should look into a name change for this food. Someone will need to be a little more creative with the naming process this time too, I don't think hot beef or hot pork is going to sell.

While I'm on the topic of things that we don't eat, it just recently dawned on me that there is something mysterious about our canine friends. It has to do with 'dog years'. I was told as a child that dog years and human years were different, specifically that 1 human year equals 7 dogs years. Now I blindly accepted this as a child and just thought "oh that just means that dogs have approximately 1/7th the life span of a human, and also mature faster than we do" (Josh age 3). Then just a few days ago I remembered that a year is not a measure of maturity in an organism, but a measure of time. A year can either be: 1. the amount of time it takes for an object to travel around the sun, or 2. a calendar year as used by the Gregorian calendar, or 365 days. Now using these definitions how can a dog year be different from a human year? Obviously we can throw out the second definition as the difference, because they are dogs, there is no way dogs could invent a calendar system. So clearly the difference between a dog year and a human year has to be due to the fact that dogs travel faster around the sun than humans do. Hopefully some scientists will be able to look into the implications of our pets traveling super fast, and also how we haven't noticed it yet.