If you can eat a pig, you can eat a dog.
The annual dog meat festival was held in the small Chinese province of Yulin this week and once again the Western world is up in arms.
It never ceases to amaze me how many meat-eaters turn their nose up at eating dogs but are happy to chomp a ham sandwich.
“But dogs are intelligent!” They cry.
So are pigs.
Pigs have even been proven to possess higher levels of intelligence than their canine companions.
The idea that eating a dog is barbaric but eating a pig is acceptable is a construct of our own culture. It is not better or worse — it is just different.
Both animals are bred for human comfort.
Both animals are sources of protein and fat.
Both animals are animals.
It’s just that in western societies: one is bred for food and the other for companionship.
The differences between the two may not be physiologically compelling but there is something about the consumption of dog that sparks the social justice fires like nothing else.
Online petitions calling to end the festival have been circulating for years with one attracting almost five million signatures.
It is difficult to control such a practice when it is run by local businesses and already lacks official Government backing.
Watch CNN’s reportage of Chinese protesters who try to buy back some of the dogs.
The consumption of dogs at the festival is not the only activity to come under fire with critics claiming the dogs are “butchered” and skinned alive before being eaten.
The claim that dogs are tortured before their death is strongly disputed by festival organisers and evidence that says otherwise is yet to be produced.
British philosopher Julian Baggini even made the suggestion that perpetuating such an idea as truth is in itself a classic form of Asia-specific racism.
“Is there not a whiff of orientalism here: a too-quick readiness to believe that the Chinese behave barbarously?” he said.
The caging of the dogs before and during the festival also gains massive amounts of publicity as westerners balk at the imagery of dogs in cramped cages.
The images may be difficult to stomach but they are also the reality of millions of factory-farmed animals who live here and overseas.
It seems hypocritical to cry murder at one but turn away from the other.
But we do.
It's a pity that dogs are man's best friend but pigs are only best dinner.
Feature image via Instagram. @stridy_ and titan_ay_chihuahua.
Top Comments
I don't agree with this festival, not because it is dog meat. I've eaten many different types of meat. It's what they do to them - there are plenty of pictures on the internet of these poor animals being skinned alive. I am not being racist - my husband is of Chinese heritage, and I have been all over Asia (not Yulin, but many other places), and I have seen the most appalling cruelty to animals. My husband's wealthier relatives have partaken in business dinners in Taiwan, where monkeys brains were eaten out of live monkeys, and complained about the noise they made when their heads were fitted into a hole in the cage and sawn open. They still pay large sums of money to buy tiger and bear products. The recent footage of cows being bludgeoned with sledgehammers in Vietnam was very distressing - because cruelty is abhorrent, regardless of whether it is dogs, whales, baby seals, or cows. If you want to eat them, ensure they are euthanized first in the most humane way possible.
That is not the point of the revolte. Of course any animals could be eaten. The outrage come from the fact of how those cats and dogs are killed.
Beaten, skinned alive, boiled alive. Caged for days and days. Distraught.
So yes you can eat a dog if it is your cultural background but for goodness sake a bit if humanity when they are killed.
Oh and the reason why they are killed that way it is because the adrenaline makes the meat tender.
That i take issue with, one thing to eat dog, i can look past that
There no need to torture the animal, any animal though