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China city holds dog-meat eating festival despite protests

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  • ASSOCIATED PRESS

    A woman walked past a dog vendor at a market during a dog meat festival in Yulin in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on Tuesday.

  • ASSOCIATED PRESS

    A woman with a load of dogs on her tricycle cart arrived at a market for sale during a dog meat festival in Yulin in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on Tuesday.

YULIN, China » A city in southern China has gone ahead with an annual dog-meat eating festival despite heavy criticism and protests from animal rights activists.

The event this week in the city of Yulin has come to symbolize the cruelty and lack of hygiene associated with the largely unregulated industry.

Activists on Tuesday bought dogs from dealers who had been planning to slaughter them, while local residents complained that outsiders were ruining what they consider a local tradition.

An estimated 10-20 million dogs are killed for their meat each year in China, and the Yulin event has become a lightning rod for criticism. Many of the dogs are believed to have been pets stolen from their owners.

The local government has in recent years sought to disassociate itself from the event.

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    • Ohh…get off your high horse and your idiotic “Western” culture sensibility. Asian countries (not only Chinese) been eating dogs for eons, perfectly acceptable when mass poverty was/is the norm. Dressing dogs up in clothes and parading around like little kids is more cruel, or breeding them in horrific conditions for the pleasure of the spoiled rich.

    • Ohh…get off your high horse and your misplaced “Western” culture sensibility. Asian countries (not only Chinese) been eating dogs for eons, perfectly acceptable when mass poverty was/is the norm. Dressing dogs up in clothes and parading around like little kids is more cruel, or breeding them in horrific conditions for the pleasure of the spoiled rich.

    • Right. If they were peoples’ pets, endangered species, etc., that’s one thing. But if you eat pork, venison, lamb, etc. there really isn’t a lot of moral ground to be criticizing what kind of meat other people eat.

  • I’m against the practice.

    However, let’s put a spin and say:
    India protests against Americans eating beef.

    Would we heed and stop ?

  • Dogs are eaten in the Philippines and South Korea too. When the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games were to begin, the city had the restaurants serving cuisine featuring dog meat were temporarily closed until after the Games ended.

    When I went to Davao City in the Philippines, I visited a training center for cockfighting. It was very interesting. Yet the Western people who visited their were appalled by it. A Filipino there said that it is their culture and Westerners had no right to impose their morals on them.

    And Japan also serves horse sashimi, a delicacy known as basashi.

    So the eating of dogs and other animals that would be considered pets in Western cultures is a reality that may not match certain palates yet it is not up to Westerners to demand such practices be stopped. One’s hunger for a hamburger is as valid as that for dog meat.

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