Yulin Summer Solstice Lychee and Dog Meat Festival

You may want to bark at me or even bite me for writing what is below, but remember that I am just the messenger of this dog-gone crazy news. It's word of China's summer 'Yulin Summer Solstice Lychee and Dog Meat Festival', in which 10,000 dogs (and some cats too) are beaten, killed and cooked for human consumption. Uh, The Dog Meat Fest is considered a festive start of summer in Yulin.  But even the dictators in China are embarrassed about that cultural event.  Yulin’s government has banned public slaughter and advertising using words “dog meat,” though it claimed that although locals had held small get-togethers in the past, the citywide festival was a myth. It is not.

Traditional in Yulin says eating dog meat brings good luck and health. But this event has caused embarrassment and anger from locals and others in China, largely because of the influence of the many Internet via social media sites that talk about and show it.  Even a tech hater like me gives a thumbs up  to that.  Eating dog meat is legal in China, but the dogs are supposed to be raised on farms and certified for human consumption before they are sold.  Animal rights advocates in China though, say dogs in Yulin are stolen from farms and family homes when they are killed.  I guess that is "fast theft food" for the Yulin crowd.

Besides the idea that killing and eating animals that are beloved pets for many is obscene, those opposed to Fido entrees say that the festival promotes crime and food safety concerns (China is ranked the second highest for the number of people who contract rabies and Yulin is one of the country's “top 10 cities” for rabies cases among humans) . Just as South Koreas forced its restaurants to stop cooking dog meat when that country hosted the Summer Olympic Games, China knows that most of the world thinks eating Fido is a savage behavior and would like to see the Yulin Fest disappear.  There are currently many nation-wide protests in China against the Dog Meat Festival, so the locals say that instead of slaughtering dogs in the streets, they do it in secret.

To we westerners such practices are revolting. The dogs are tortured, skinned alive and sometimes cooked while still alive. That a human pet (dogs have become very popular pets in most of China) would be treated in that way is alarming  and bolsters the claim in that the progress of civilization has a long way to go.  Meanwhile, cows, sheep, chicken, pigs are slaughtered in the west without anyone objecting beyond ensuring humane slaughter of the animals.  But in the end, if we can judge a society based on how it treats its animals, China has a long way to go before we can consider it a civilized society.