China’s Paradox: Love for Dogs as Pets or Food?

Some Chinese will slaughter thousands of dogs for food at Yulin’s dog meat festival, but the trend is changing.

Caged dogs sit inside a cafe on the road side, waiting to be transferred to a slaughterhouse in a narrow alley. (Photo: AP)

(Photo advisory: Some images in this story may not be appropriate for animal lovers.)

Yulin in the Guangx region of China has an annual ritual which inevitably ends up drawing outrage from across the world.

In honour of the summer solstice, at least 10,000 dogs will reportedly be slaughtered at the Yulin festival beginning June 22nd. The event does not have official endorsement but there isn’t any plan to clamp down on it either.

Campaign Against the Festival

In 2011, an online petition led to the event’s cancellation.

Similar petitions (1,2) this year have not been able to stop 2015’s event despite garnering three million signatures.

The animals are stuffed into cages and kept without food and water for days according to this CNN special report. It adds that “the dogs arrive at their destination malnourished and underweight, dehydrated, often dying from injuries or from being poisoned during capture.”

Thousands of activists are reportedly travelling to Yulin to try to rescue as many dogs as possible.

This isn’t the first time though. Protests, online and on the ground, have been taking place since 2010-11.

Tradition? Really?

Most media commentaries report that the tradition goes back 600 years. China’s SINA news reports that while consumption of dog meat has historical precedence in China, the festival in Yulin actually dates back to 2009.

The Chinese government, while not banning the event, did seem to discourage it earlier. A similar festival in Zhejiang was cancelled a few years ago and the local government tried to distance itself from Yulin’s event.

In recent years, a few people in Yulin would get together on the summer solstice to eat dog meat and lychees, to the extent that it’s gradually become a culinary tradition. This so-called ‘Summer Solstice Lychee and Dog Meat Festival’ is just something individual businesses and people have come up with, and in fact this holiday doesn’t exist.
— Zhejiang’s local authorities in a statement in 2011

A woman on her moped transports more than 10 dogs, which had just been slaughtered, to her market shop for sale. (Photo: AP)

Even the national media (considered a mouthpiece of the government) has discouraged Chinese citizens from associating itself from this festival.

It might be difficult to draw a universally accepted line as to what animals should be eaten. But when there is already a vast variety of meat, maybe it is time to stop serving dog.
— Xinhua

From Tip of a Knife to End of a Leash

Once banned by Communist leader Chairman Mao Zedong as a bourgeois pastime, having a pet has now become a symbol of financial success in China, where the pet care sector is expected to grow by more than half to 15.8 billion yuan ($2.6 billion) by 2019.

Slaughtered canines are hung up for sale in Dong Kou market, as a dog looks on. (Photo: AP)

Reuters reports that loneliness and stress endemic to city life are also driving the pet ownership boom: last year, some 30 million households, or nearly 7 percent of the nationwide total, owned a dog.

There is another reason. The dog meat traders don’t want their children to follow in their footsteps.