"It's easy to get angry about China's Yulin dog-eating festival. But we're hypocrites."

I’ve just seen some pictures I can never unsee. They’re from a dog-eating festival in Yulin, China.

The festival doesn’t just involve eating dogs. It involves doing some horribly cruel things to the dogs before eating them.

If you’re a dog lover, or a dog liker, or even a dog tolerator, don’t follow this link.

Trust me.

But it struck me. Here I was, finishing up a bowl of homemade beef stew, and being outraged about the dog-eating festival. Feeling sympathy for one slaughtered animal while gobbling down another slaughtered animal. Yes. I fall into that very large group of people that cares about animals, but not enough to be vegetarian or vegan. I think the official term is “hypocrites”.

I’m sure the cow I just ate in my stew was not boiled alive like the dogs in Yulin. But, let’s face it, it died for someone’s dinner, just the same. If you’re alone in a room with a murderer, you would hope they wouldn’t torture you before killing you. But what you’d really like, if you had the choice, is not to be killed at all. And what kind of life did that cow have, anyway? Or the pig that went into my ham sandwich yesterday? Or the chicken that went so nicely with my chips and coleslaw last week?

We all have vague images of farms that come straight out of kids’ picture books. Cows munching at the grass in green fields. Pigs rolling in mud. Chickens clucking as they peck contentedly in barnyards. We know that’s not the reality, of course. But we probably haven’t done a lot of googling to find out exactly what the reality is. It’s easier not to know, isn’t it? Easier to watch another cat video. But I thought, if I could look at the pictures of the Yulin festival, I could face finding out a bit about factory farming in Australia.

The truth is, most of the pigs and chickens we eat in Australia are factory farmed. Most of them will never see the sun or feel the earth under their feet.

According to animal protection institute Voiceless, pregnant pigs are often kept in sow stalls so small that the pigs can’t even turn around. Chickens can be kept 20 to a square metre, which means their personal space is about as big as an A4 piece of paper.

A lot of practices that would be classified as animal cruelty if a dog or cat was involved are legal if it’s a pig or chicken being raised for food. That seems a bit unfair, especially when pigs are just as smart as dogs. Sure, they’re not being skinned alive, like the dogs in Yulin, but their entire lives are miserable. And short.

Dairy cows don’t have great lives either. They’re artificially impregnated every 13 months so that they keep producing milk. In some parts of Australia, it’s legal to kill unwanted newborn calves by hitting them on the head with a hammer.

Like a lot of people, I think about animal welfare, a little bit.

I proudly tell myself that I only buy free-range chicken, conveniently forgetting that I also grab a takeaway roast chook every few weeks. (Am I the only person who wonders why roast chickens are so cheap nowadays? Ten bucks for a whole chook pretty much guarantees that bird didn’t live a life of luxury.)

I also buy free-range eggs, but I’m going to have to stop feeling smug about it now that I know the term “free-range” is basically meaningless.

If you’re feeling upset about the Yulin festival, you can sign the petition here or use the hashtag #StopYulin2015.

But it’s easy, real easy, to get outraged at something foreigners are doing on the other side of the world. (A dog-eating festival? Barbaric!) It’s harder to get outraged about something that goes on every day, around us, because we’re helping fund it.

Anyway, I’m off to pat my dogs and grab a vegie burger.

Here are some public responses from #StopYulin2015 (post continues after gallery)…

Have you seen the public’s reaction to Yulin? What are your thoughts?

For more on animal rights, have a look here:

Radio station bludgeons baby rabbit live on air with bike pump, to ‘spark debate.’

Investigation into claims australian cattle were slaughtered with sledgehammer in Vietnam.

No PETA. Shearing sheep isn’t cruel. Not shearing? THAT is.

Sarah Palin to PETA: ‘There is nothing wrong with standing on a dog. Chill.’