Reflections on the Yulin Lychee and Dog Meat Festival

I must warn you, prior to reading this, that there is extremely distressing content, and your discretion in reading it is advised. If you tend to get upset by reports of animal abuse, and I know it can be really hard to deal with once you have read it, then you might want to give this week a miss.

So. This week, as I sit here writing this, Yulin is once again taking place. I feel sick knowing that right now, hundreds of dogs are being boiled alive, skinned alive and blow torched alive, as they are every other hour of the day for all these days, in the tens of thousands. I have watched videos this week and recently and have seen perhaps the vilest cruelty. I cannot imagine what greater pain there can be, or a more horrible way to die. One particularly distressing video showed a dog, hog tied and in a boiling pan of water. As the person inflicting this torture moved around the dog, its tail wagged. Maybe this was either an involuntary reaction of the nerves, or an appeasement gesture, begging for mercy, which never came. I hope that the dog died quickly, as with them all, but something tells me this is unlikely.

If we had news of a serial killer, and details were released that they were skinning their victims alive, or boiling them, or blow torching them, we would consider them the worst of all psychopaths. We would take in all the information, and talk about it. When it’s dogs, we have a curious tendency to shut our eyes and ears to it. We try not to think about it. Perhaps it hurts us more when it is animals. But the consequence is we don’t do anything. Year after year, Yulin occurs again.

So what can we do? Sure, there are the petitions. I think there was some poignancy when along with a group of humans, four dogs, rescued from Yulin, delivered a 1.5 million signature strong petition to the Chinese Embassy in London. But can this work?

As you may have heard, and certainly as I mentioned in my last post, China removed dogs from the official livestock list, rendering it illegal to farm dogs. As predicted though, this has not stopped Yulin. China mentions that, as Yulin is not State run, there is some issue with intervening. They do not have the incentive to ban it. What incentive can there be?

 

All those people horrified by Yulin could boycott China. Do any of them really take care in what they purchase? As sales in Chinese produced merchandise drop due to coronavirus, it certainly is possible. Yet when it comes to the dog meat trade, I am not so sure that people follow through with their disgust. I have to wonder why. Maybe it is wrong to target the many people in China who oppose the dog meat trade by affecting their business, but the point is a message needs to be sent that, whilst every State is free to fulfil self-determination, so we are free to refuse to trade with them. I am afraid that in this World, money talks.

I have read much discussion about the dog meat trade, and there are many threads which appear, just a couple of which I mention here.

·         "China is free to eat dog meat, if that is what they want to do." True, although over 60% of Chinese people, according to a recent survey, oppose the trade.

·         "It is yet another example of Western Imperialism to try to end the trade." This is an argument I come across all the time in international human rights law. With some issues, maybe it is wrong for a Western democratic view to prevail over the East, but with others, such as the right to life, it is a common thread of humanity. And that is what is at stake here too. It is inhumane to relish the torture of an animal in the perverse belief it makes them taste better. If an animal is to die to feed a human, then let it be with dignity. This is not a peculiarly Western view. This is a human view.

·        " It is wrong to say what animals can and cannot be eaten." To those that then claim they don’t eat any animals, I have even seen the come back that they eat plants and bacteria, and therefore are just as judgmental on who can live and die. Firstly, let us consider the taking of non-animal life. No one can seriously say that there is no difference between a sentient animal and a lettuce. I won’t even give time to that argument. Secondly, there is the argument that if we eat cows and pigs, then we cannot argue against dog meat. I used to eat meat, and yet felt strongly about the dog meat trade. I did, and still do, believe there is a big difference and not just a cultural one. However, I did become a vegetarian to avoid the hypocrisy.

So why not dogs? Am I just saying that we should ban the cruel deaths and allow the dog meat trade? We are not going to create a vegan world in the near future, so certainly we should at least end the torture if not the trade. Some research suggests that dogs have conscious self-awareness (see the University of Portsmouth. I hope to add to this at some point). This would certainly raise questions over whether we should be killing them to eat them. Other research is now suggesting other species also have self-awareness. However, I do feel there is a difference with dog meat, and quite simply, it is the betrayal.

Dogs are unique. We did not domesticate dogs. All scientific evidence points towards a gradual friendship, built between wolves and humans. It was a 50-50 relationship where both parties decided they wanted to know the other. True friendship. Research is suggesting this took place perhaps 30,000 years ago, perhaps even in China somewhat ironically. Since that time, dogs have evolved away from wolves, they try to copy us, they can read our emotions, they have unique methods to communicate with us that they don’t use with each other. Other than us, they are the only species that forms a stronger bond with another species, us, than with their own. They have been given royal burials with their own tombs in Egypt. What went wrong? I am not saying that it is right to eat other animals, but that there is a good reason why humans should not be eating dogs.

There is a fundamental, qualitative difference between dogs and all other animals. They are our friends.

That’s all for this week. It doesn’t seem right to talk about anything else.