IAR on Dog-eating in Yulin, China
2010 was quite a year in Yulin’s history–the small, remote city in Guangxi China woke up from a typical muggy summer night and found itself world-famous…or, more accurately, INFAMOUS; before that its name were hardly known to most Chinese. All this sudden attention could be traced to the coming of Xia Zhi (beginning day of summer), which the locals celebrate with feasts featuring one specific “delicacy”: dog meat.
The revelation of the brutal dog-eating behavior has brought Yulin severe condemnation from the international society, but the custom (now commonly known as Yulin Dog Meat Festival) has its defenders as well. According to the latter, dog-eating is merely one of the many traditional practices and therefore provides no ground for public outrage. While the issue continues to arouse heated debate, there are some indisputable hard facts that constitute the best refutations of the “not-a-big-deal” pro-Festival arguments.
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The sources of the dogs are suspicious. Given the nonexistence of food-use dog farms, the simple question of where the dogs come from can lead to discoveries of nasty crimes in the industry. Around 10,000 dogs are killed for their meat for the Festival every year. Some of these dogs are stray dogs captured from streets, but even more stunningly, many others are pet dogs stolen away from their owners, as the poor creatures have dog collars around their necks till the last minute of their lives. It is undeniably a criminal act to steal pets, not to mention the heartbreaking endings of those once-beloved animals.
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The slaughter of dogs is usually conducted in an extremely cruel way. The captured dogs are often shipped in overly crowded cages and kept in vile environments after arriving in Yulin, which results in countless deaths from stress, injuries and diseases even before the Festival. When the time comes, the remaining dogs would be forced to watch yet another horrible scene, where other dogs are abused, slaughtered and dismembered right in front of their very eyes as they make desperate yet futile attempts to escape.
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Dog meat can put public health in peril. Since dogs are never food-use livestock, the absence of legal standards for dog meat production suggests enormous difficulty in guaranteeing the safety of dog meat. Therefore, potential diseases of the dogs can have a massive impact on the consumers’ health. As a matter of fact, Yulin, along with several other cities in Guangxi Province has been under frequent attack of rabies, and it is hard not to relate that with the dog-eating custom of the region.
