Chinese dog meat festival

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This one's for you Jersey Girl. Can we both agree this is just wrong?

China’s Yulin Dog Meat Festival Survives Celebrity Activism, ‘Wet Market’ Fears

The Yulin Lychee and Dog Meat Festival, a tradition in the southern Chinese city, is set to begin on Summer Solstice, or Sunday, despite years of global animal rights activism urging China to end it.

The festival typically attracts large crowds of carnivores seeking to eat dog meat, often in “hot pot” form, and eat the fruit for which the event is named as a way of cooling down during the summer heat. Chinese merchants from around the country travel to Yulin to sell dog meat, often transporting live dogs and gruesomely butchering them in open markets.

Images of dogs being killed in open-air markets, hung upside down, trapped in filthy cages, and butchered have triggered campaigns around the world to stop the festival, ongoing for almost as long as the festival, which was founded in 2009.

The years 2015 and 2016, in particular, attracted widespread Hollywood scrutiny to the festival. In 2015, pop celebrities like Paris Hilton, Simon Cowell, and Ricky Gervais all made public calls for an end to the festival. The next year, the Animal Hope and Wellness Foundation, which has run operations to rescue dogs from the festival, organized a celebrity video featuring Matt Damon, Joaquin Phoenix, and a host of others bringing awareness to the mass killing and eating of dogs in Yulin.

That year, Congress also welcomed reality television star Lisa Vanderpump to testify on the horrors of the Yulin dog meat festival.
While global outrage has now become nearly as much of a tradition as the dog eating itself, Yulin’s dog meat lovers now face new scrutiny in light of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, which Chinese officials initially blamed on the unsanitary conditions at an open-air “wet market” in central Wuhan city. While the Communist Party now blames a conspiracy by the U.S. military – without evidence – for the pandemic, scientists around the world agree that “wet market” environments are high-risk locations for deadly pathogens to jump from animal meat to humans.

Animal rights organizations argue that the public butchering of animals in “wet markets,” often resulting in streams of blood throughout the area, is not only a clear public health risk but a moral atrocity. Many equate Asia’s wet markets with live animal butchers offering chicken and other common Western meats in the United States.
In past years, the Chinese government has used several tactics to dispel global disgust that have varied from claiming the festival does not exist to spreading rumors that Beijing had banned it. This year, China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs passed a law, amid the uproar about wet markets, limiting the species that can be bred as livestock to a small set of animals. Addressing concerns that bats or pangolins, a species of anteater, may have introduced the Chinese coronavirus to humans, those species did not make the cut. Notably, dogs were also not on the list, making it illegal to breed them for food.

While the move elicited some international praise, animal rights activists noted that the new regulations did not ban the consumption of dog meat and that butchers often sold stray dogs or stolen pets, in any way. Recent reports suggest that preparations for the Lychee and Dog Meat Festival are well underway.

“The scale of the dog meat trade in Yulin is pretty much the same compared to previous years,” Yu Dezhi, an animal welfare advocate, told the South China Morning Post, which reported in early June that “dog meat lovers are returning in full force” to Yulin.
Humane Society International revealed on Friday that its partners on the ground in China had found “rows and rows of dog carcasses lying on tables or being butchered with cleavers, all in defiance of a Chinese Ministry of Agriculture statement last month that dogs are not meant for human consumption.”
While the Humane Society stated that “there appears to be less activity this year than usual,” this may be in large part due to the coronavirus pandemic, which prompted China to impose total lockdowns on multiple major cities and discourage mass gatherings. The virus continues to ravage large parts of Beijing, though Communist Party media insist that the situation is under control.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), in a statement to Breitbart News, described the situation in Yulin this week as “unclear.”
“Earlier this month, China created a livestock list that didn’t include dogs, but it did not — despite what many outlets have reported — remove dogs from a livestock list, because no such list previously existed,” a PETA representative explained. “This move should prevent the dog-meat industry from obtaining the certificates needed to breed, transport, and slaughter dogs — but at the same time, the government official making the announcement explicitly stated that the livestock list will not affect the dog-meat trade.”

PETA Asia Vice President Jason Baker said in a statement that the organization places limited emphasis on legal changes and instead considers making their case against animal abuse to individuals a more successful strategy.

“PETA Asia has never relied on rules and regulations to help animals, because government announcements and reality don’t always align,” Baker said. “The key to change lies in empowering consumers and businesses to make kinder choices to help animals, and after more than 20 years of activism in China, PETA Asia has seen fur sales drop, vegan food sales skyrocket, and celebrities speak out for animals. Progress is slow but steady, and the interest in seeing animals for who they are, rather than as commodities, is growing in China.”

Highlighting the discrepancy between Chinese government announcements and the reality on the ground is the case of the 2017 Yulin dog meat festival, which was rumored to be canceled about a month before it was to happen. The Daily Mail reported at the time that China would implement a ban on consumption of dog meat on June 15, a week before Summer Solstice. The local Yulin government added to the allegedly positive news by claiming that the festival “doesn’t exist,” according to the Chinese state-run Global Times. Hidden in that report was the fact that Yulin officials also denied the existence of the ban on the sale of dog meat.

“With the announcement (from a very large international group) of a supposed ban on dog meat sales the week before the festival – it definitely had a negative effect on the attention brought to the Festival,” the Animal Hope and Wellness Foundation told Breitbart News that year. “Many celebs who normally tweet and post about it have been silent believing that the festival was over … We have been on the ground all week and there are no big groups there – especially the ones collecting large donations to Stop Yulin.”

The same Chinese state newspaper that reported Yulin officials’ denials of the existence of the festival reported shortly thereafter that the festival indeed took place, though allegedly in a “much more subdued manner” due to animal rights protesters. The Global Times made the same claims of a “low-profile” or “subdued” version of the festival in 2015, 2016 and 2018, as well, before apparently avoiding covering it last year.
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.

https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2020/06/ ... ket-fears/

AsiaEnvironmentNational SecurityAnimal RightsChinacoronavirusPETAYulin Dog Meat Festival

[_EAllusion]

Hey, another Brietbart article with no indication until the very end.

The focus seems to be on "look at those gross Chinese people eating dogs" to perpetuate the stereotype of Chinese people as gross dog-eaters, but insofar as there's an argument, it seems to be that a concern about spreading disease? But are dogs more likely to be a source of zoonotic transfer of disease to humans than other forms of meat? I can name examples of horrible diseases that jumped from pigs and chickens to humans right off the top of my head, but I can't think of a dog-based one, though in fairness, the former is a lot heavily farmed than the latter. If this article was vegan argument against raising animals for consumption, then this argument would make sense, but even though it cites PETA, it's not. Is the issue the dogs who are hunted for meat? Is this an article criticizing hunting game for meat due to disease risk? Is there an increased disease risk? You know what also creates risk of zoonosis? Living with animals. Is the point of view here meant to tell us to stop keeping dogs as pets?

So why are you citing it Ajax? What point do you wish to make with it? Because we keep dogs (and cats) as pets and have closer attachments to them and their social nature, there's no shortage of people who see killing (and eating) dogs as much, much worse than animals we raise for slaughter. This makes for some eye-brow raising animal cruelty laws that don't seem to be grounded in any coherent or defensible position on the ethics of animal rights. Maybe you're one of those people, but are you planning on justifying that stance? Is that why you posted this? Pigs are quite intelligent creatures with interests - like dogs - yet you'd never see an "Ew. Gross" Brietbart article on raising pigs for slaughter and eating them that cites PETA, nor do I think we'd see you stealth linking such an article. Why? What are you trying to say here?

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

What ideological consistency was shown in Ajax’s post above?

https://ibb.co/Ry4Mpnj

- Doc

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What ideological consistency was shown in Ajax’s post above?

https://ibb.co/Ry4Mpnj

- Doc

I wasn't striving for ideological consistency. I just find eating dogs repulsive. I'm not a fan of eating horses either. I can't eat snakes because they're to disgusting to me.

[_ajax18]

Pigs are quite intelligent creatures with interests.

They are. I kind of like pigs. I never liked killing them but they do taste good.

I don't know. Do you have an evolutionary reason why a carnivore like me would be so repulsed by eating dogs? I'm not sure why Chinese people are so different in this respect but it does make me think twice about going to the Chinese buffet.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

You don’t have to strive for consistency to be consistent. You just are.

- Doc

[_EAllusion]

Pigs are quite intelligent creatures with interests.

They are. I kind of like pigs. I never liked killing them but they do taste good.

I don't know. Do you have an evolutionary reason why a carnivore like me would be so repulsed by eating dogs? I'm not sure why Chinese people are so different in this respect but it does make me think twice about going to the Chinese buffet.

Dog are social and have evolved to care about and be responsive to human interests. You exist in a culture that cares about them and probably have direct experience with dogs responding to your cues in a way that makes it easy to anthropomorphize them. They correspondingly feel more person-like and therefore the idea of killing them feels more repugnant. If you had a beloved house-pet, the idea of them being killed for food probably is horrifying to you.

The question is does this experience mean that dogs deserve a higher standard of respect than, say, pigs, and I don't think the arguments that say they do are very persuasive. Whether that means we should be more comfortable being worse to dogs are less comfortable treating pigs as we do is a separate question. It's probably the latter, but it's a real hard area of ethics.

P.S. You're stereotyping over a billion Chinese people here and should stop. It's like asking why Americans love eating rattlesnakes. I don't. That's a niche thing.

[_EAllusion]

I haven't seen a poll on this, but I'd bet that if you asked people is it worse to kill a dog or a cat, I bet you most people would say a dog. And I think the reason for that is cats, sometimes, are more aloof. But why would cats having more of their own life make them less worthy of respect? Extend this intuition to animals that aren't as socially attuned with humans, but likely are as cognitively complex. Say, bears. It's very easy to argue yourself from a position of strong respect for dog rights into a general mammal rights stance.

[_Chap]

I haven't seen a poll on this, but I'd bet that if you asked people is it worse to kill a dog or a cat, I bet you most people would say a dog.

Frankly, dogs are tolerable if dull eating (I've had some, with onions and ginger on a cold winter's day, the right season for such a dish; the seasonings made most of the taste).

Cats, which are total carnivores, are reputed not to be nice at all to eat compared to dogs, who, like pigs, are pretty omnivorous.

Frankly, I suggest we give up discussing the moral edibility of animals based on whether they wag their tails at us and lick our faces. An animal's right to life does not depend on whether they have been bred to be nice to humans. Eat one, eat them all (if they taste good, of course).

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Haaaa.. Good one, Chap. Ha ha. So funny. *wipes tear* Ha. Legend.

Many moons ago before Camp Humphreys, located in the Republic of Korea, expanded its footprint there was a dog farm located along the perimeter fence where we would often have to run. Some mornings were spent silently jogging past the farm as the screams of dogs being tortured and slaughtered echoed throughout the cool air. It was absolutely gut wrenching, and did very little for our cultural relationships with the local population.

Luckily for international relations Koreans have slowly reduced their collective appetite for dog meat and replaced it with an equally lusty hunger for androgynous k-pop entertainers, anime, and cell phones that play both.

- Doc