WARNING: IF YOU LOVE DOGS OR ANIMALS OR YOU'RE JUST SQUEEMISH, DON'T SCROLL DOWN. LEAVE NOW!
It's that time of year again
Yes, the Yulin Dog Meat festival is back, on track as always, much to the dismay of animal rights activists, celebrities and pretty much everyone who isn't from Yulin, Guangxi.
For those of you who are not aware of this festival, the Lychee and Dog Meat Festival, as it is officially called, is an annual celebration in a southern city of China. In essence, people get together and eat lychee and dog meat, among other things (like cats)
Numbers typically land around 10-15,000 dogs that are killed and consumed during this time. But is this festival a barbaric, heinous monstrosity that we should all band together and put an end to, or is it another innocent tradition we westerner's can't stomach because the meat of choice is dog instead of pig?
Well, kind of both.
What's wrong with dog meat?
Well, this is a common point, and a relevant one. Why should we stop people eating dogs just because we personally consider them companions? Who do you know avoids eating cows because some people in India consider them sacred?
Historically, dogs have been companions of ours for around 33,000 years, but when the going gets tough, the dog gets eaten, and that's simply how it has to be. This has been evident all over the world - including the USA. Europeans would survive largely on Dog and Badger some 3,000 years ago, and the Mongols would eat their own horses in tough times (which was most of the time for those guys).
It seems the only difference from history is that we consider dogs companions and parts of the family in the West, so we look upon China as family-eaters; cannibals. But in reality, that's just not the case. That being said, the rise of dog ownership in China has exploded in recent years, with 60 million dogs registered as pets, and many more in addition to that. There is indeed an increase of outspoken voices in China to stop the consumption of dogs, and an increasing number of local activists, too.
But dogs simply aren't endangered like the heavily threatened whales Japan loves to hunt, going largely unnoticed by mainstream media. So why is it such an issue? As a poor Chinese person watching these protests, they're simply going to think you're mad.
So with that argument undone, what else?
Torture
If it were just as simple as dog meat being another meat to eat, I'd be OK with it. If you're going to complain about dogs being eaten, stop being a hypocrite with your steak sandwiches.
But there are very questionable practices going on in the process of meat preparation in the Yulin festival. Traditional Chinese beliefs - or bullshit, as I like to call it - claim that a dog should be in the most torturous pain possible before it dies, to get the adrenaline running, which makes the meat tastier. Ideas to achieve this are, for example, skinning the dog alive, or throwing a live dog onto a boiling hot metal plate until it slowly dies, burning it alive with a blowtorch, or simply drowning it slowly in a vat of boiling water.
Conditions before this are not even much better for the dogs, being transported in bulk in tiny cages, often to the point that their lungs are being crushed and their faces are being pushed through the mesh wire. Upon arrival, they can be expected to wait around in a room full of dogs and pee and poo until they get chosen for torture, or called through a hatch where they can be seen hopefully wagging their tales thinking a new owner has come, only to get whacked on the head with a baseball bat. I shan't share these videos.
At this point, things get questionable. Festival goers deny this and insist dogs are being treated humanely, and its an activists word against a store owner's. And besides, animal torture is totally legal in China. There are simply no animal welfare laws in place.
So why not put a stop to this terrible festival?
Well, basically, we can't.
Recently it was claimed that the festival of 2017 was finally banned, but journalists went to take a look and ask the locals and nobody had heard of such a thing happening. In fact, the only thing they got was exasperation that the western media keeps interfering every single year and should stick to their own business.
Officially, the local government has said outright that it's not their place to ban it since it isn't an official government run event, it's just people selling dog meat in large numbers. The people maintain their rights to do it however they please.
So let's take it into our own hands
Nope. Bad idea. This is done every year, and various activists are spending thousands of dollars buying dogs from the festival folk and taking them to rescue centres en masse, much to the joy of social media. But the logistics fall apart after the initial emotional burst of heroism, and in the end, things are made much, much worse by trying to be the good guy.
First, buying the dogs to rescue them is simply giving money to the sellers, encouraging them to get more dogs, and naturally, jack up the prices. You're simply providing them with business, and doing nothing to stop them.
Second, what are we going to do with all these dogs? in 2015, 1,400 dogs were rescued and put into a shelter. Only 400 survived, after the rest died from disease and awful living conditions.
More famously, Marc Ching, a high-profile activist, rescued 1,000 dogs himself. It was later revealed that the majority of those dogs died 'after being denied life-saving injections and medical treatment by the Buddhist organizations which bought them.'
Most of the proper activist groups in China insist that the worst possible time to rescue dogs is during the meat festival, when prices go high, transparency is at a minimum, and scams are rife. Better yet, rescue dogs in other places. Lovers of dogs could save a lot more in number this way.
So...
Yeah. It's tough. This is one of those unfortunate times where we are left naked and helpless. We have to accept that diving in all vigilante-style into the core of an issue we deem sickening, is simply not going to work. The best thing we can do it teach and inform, and help the country develop a love and respect of the natural world that is more on-par with the rest of the world.
We can protest to the authorities to enforce more humane practices, but to stop it altogether is most likely out of the question.
We have to take a step back and actually think about what the best approach to these sensitive issues are, and as tragic as it is, thousands upon thousands of dogs are going to suffer in the time being.