Some Chinese are calling for an end to the Yulin Dog Meat Festival

Hei-hei is 3 years old. She loves snoozing spread-eagled on her back, playing with a football, and sausages. She hates early morning exercise and, clichés be damned, cats — especially that sandy-colored rascal who is forever prowling our roof. And were she not rescued from a construction site as a puppy, Hei-hei may well have now have been eaten.

My wife and I recently adopted Hei-hei from the TACN rescue center on the outskirts of Beijing. Like practically all the animals there, she was destined for China’s dog-meat trade. An estimated 10 million dogs are devoured across China each year, including around 10,000 that end up at the infamous Yulin Dog Meat Festival, which kicks off once again on June 21 in Guangxi.

But perhaps not for long. Last Friday, dozens of protesters gathered at the Yulin government offices in Beijing to present a petition of 11 million signatures demanding the festival’s abolition. “Yulin is a total embarrassment to China,” says Xu Yufeng, founder of Beijing Mothers Against Animal Cruelty. The event should end, she added, “in the interests of public security, food safety, social morality and China’s reputation.”

Every culture has its culinary peccadillos, and China has a long history of eating dogs. The practice predates written annals, and even the craftsmen who created the famed Terracotta Army were partial, according to a new study. It is a habit mirrored in other Asian nations — from Cambodia and Vietnam to Korea. Traditionally, dogs are eaten for medicinal qualities, as their meat is supposed to stoke the body’s yang energy. At Yulin, there’s also a superstition about bringing good fortune at the summer solstice.

“Dogs are no different than other livestock, and dog meat is nutritious,” one Beijing dog farmer and butcher, who sells about 50 kg of dog meat a day to restaurants and private households, tells TIME. “I think we should eat dogs, which are just farm animals, like pigs.”

China has less than 100 recognized dog farms, most of which are very small, say animal-rights activists, keeping around 30 adult dogs at any one time to prevent the incidence and spread of diseases. The above farmer, who asks to remain anonymous, keeps just 50 young and mature animals, and says it takes six or seven months until dogs are ready for slaughter.

This tiny capacity means that the vast majority of the canines eaten in China are strays and pilfered pets (warning: distressing link). Dog owners across the country have to be on red alert for snatch thieves in the run-up to Yulin.

While eating dog has ancient roots, Yulin’s supporters can’t pretend that the festival has precedent. The event only started in the 1990s and isn’t official — the local authorities even deny there is a festival as such. Instead, they say it’s simply an informal gathering of like-minded individuals. Dogs are bludgeoned to death on the spot, and then eaten with an accompaniment of lychees and grain alcohol.

China’s growing affluence, however, is quickly changing it into a nation of dog lovers, not eaters. To be sure, in harsher times dogs were either a source food or protection — but now they increasingly kept for companionship. Day or night, our quiet Beijing street teems with handsome pedigrees, including a silky black labrador, a couple of imperious corgis and an enormous Siberian husky. (Such breeds, being over 35 cm tall, are technically illegal inside the city center, though the authorities evidently turn one heck of a blind eye.) Our Hei-hei — a Pekingese cross, we believe — looks quite the cur in such well-bred circles.

“Dogs are humans’ friends. They safeguard people and even rescue people. Having dogs also helps children with autism,” says an anti-Yulin protester, Qi Qi, 33, holding a rescued black poodle called Nu-nu. “And dogs need to be cared for and vaccinated.”

People eat dog meat at a dog-meat restaurant district during the Yulin Dog Meat Festival in the Chinese city of Yulin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, on June 22, 2015





Kyung Kim Horn—Reuters

The preening, affection and potentially deleterious rule flouting exhibited by China’s urban pet owners is hard to reconcile with the barbarity of Yulin. Thousands of distressed animals are packed into sweltering crates, at the very zenith of the summer inferno, and transported in journeys that can last days to the southern city of 7 million. Many are dead on arrival. Rabies, which kills around 100 Chinese each year, is a major concern. Dogs are responsible for 9 out of 10 cases in China. Eating strays and pets at Yulin, with no clue as to their origin or health, is worse than scavenging roadkill.

Protesters have had some success before. In 2011, Chinese authorities bannedthe Jinhua Hutou Dog Meat Festival in Zhejiang province. That festival dated back six centuries and was rooted in commemoration of a legendary battle, yet it was nixed because of the public outcry.

Yulin could be stopped if current laws, which prohibit the mass transportation of live animals without prior laboratory quarantine, were implemented. Currently, the trucks that arrive in Yulin are waved through. (China has a draft animal-welfare law but it’s not yet been passed.)

According to Professor Guo Peng, an expert in the dog-meat trade at Shandong University, the Yulin government has repeatedly ignored regulation violations she has personally brought to their attention, though it has taken some measures to reduce the tension caused by the festival. “The Yulin government is a local regulator of a remote area,” she says, “I’m not sure of the [central] government’s power of execution.”

Instead, activists are taking the lead. On Wednesday, the Humane Society International (HSI) said it had rescued 29 dogs and five cats from a slaughterhouse in Yulin. “Once they realized we weren’t there to hurt them, but in fact we would make their suffering stop at last, they very quickly responded with licks and wagging tails,” said Peter Li, HSI’s China policy specialist.

Yulin, and the dog-meat trade in general, will be hard to stamp out while it remains so lucrative. “Most of the dog meat is from stolen dogs, so there is no cost in breeding and the price is lower than pork and lamb, leading to a high profit margin,” adds Guo. “It is difficult for the government to stop the chasing of profit.”

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Yulin Dog Meat Festival and Chinese Limitless Cruelty!

This has been thee most disturbing and awful blog I have written too date! I cannot begin to tell you how emotionally difficult it has been to look at these dreadful photos and to post these heart-rendering images. I sit here typing to you literally with a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. As an owner of a dog who saved my life in more ways than one, a dog to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, and who shares my life as my companion and best friend, it breaks my heart.

Front legs dislocated. Look at the terror and pain in her eyes

I am powerless to change this on my own, which is why I share this with you. Together, we can do something to put an end to this yearly suffering. Sadly, the only way we could put an end of any, and all suffering on a global basis, would be to eliminate man!

He, and he alone, is the only living creature who breathes air into its lungs, who is capable of the dreadful levels of cruelty, inflicted on humans and well as animal. 

Being skinned alive

Nothing else on the planet with a pulse, is capable of this. Only Man. The 'evolved' one. Man, who walks with a Bible, a Torah, A Quran, and whatever else he prays to, tucked under his arm. He asks his God for victory while he marches into battle slaying and maiming as he goes along. He prays for rain during drought. He turns to God in times of desperation. Yet man, and man alone, is the cause of the all earths suffering.

Every year since 2009, between the 21st June and the 30th June, China has a festival. This is no ordinary festival. Its a festival of pain and torture. All this pain, suffering and cruelty, is believed to help ward off the heat in the summer months! This is the Lychee and Dog Eating Festival in China. More commonly known as the Yulin Dog Meat Festival.

In Guangxi Zhuang Region, more than 10 000 dogs are tortured to death in this week. Over China a grand total of 20-30 million dogs are burned alive while their mouths are tied shut.

Skinned alive, and thrown alive, into boiled pots of water. They are paraded through the town on spikes, laughed at, and photographed for trophy pics by the locals who encourage more pain to be inflicted.
This 'Festival' has to be stopped. In 2014 the local government decided to disassociate itself from the event and went so far as to forbid its employees from attending and limited the size of this festival by shutting down a few dog markets and slaughter houses. Its not enough!

Trying to climb out of boiling water. 

Many still wearing their collars arrive at this market. These dogs are trucked up to a 1000 miles and using force, are pushed into cages big enough for one or two dogs at the most. They are in metal cages without food or water. Which means some die, and many arrive ill and diseased.

The restaurant owners claim that inducing extreme pain and fear before actually boiling the dog alive, brings a rush of adrenaline which the restaurants believe makes the meat tastier.

Dear God in heaven. Have you any idea how many times that poor animal has died psychologically and mentally before it gets thrown into a pot of boiling water after its been skinned alive?

That dog still alive with its back legs chopped off and the skinning having begun

I am so very sad. These photos are just awful, and I am sorry to have to publish them. But these animals don't have a voice and we need to speak for them. In order to bring the seriousness home, I have to put these heart rendering pictures on. If you don't see them, you have no idea what is going on in China.

You know, some days after reading my emails and signing petitions to everything wrong in the world today, I feel such despair. I want to pack my bags, head for the hills, and never be exposed to the media again. It truly is a depressing world with the worst possible cruelty inflicted on some animal, child or adult every second.

Just when I think, It cant possibly get any worse, the next one beats it. Man, truly is an awful species. Never again, should anyone use the term 'They behave like animals' because animals in their entirety have never raped their babes, tortured their own species for fun, maimed and killed just for he hell of it, and they don't have an evil bone in their bodies. That DNA is ours, and ours alone!