2015-06-2
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A Chinese customer buys dog meat at a market ahead of the dog-meat festival in Yulin, south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, June 17, 2015.
ImagineChina
Thousands of dogs, many of them stolen pets, were slaughtered during the weekend’s dog-meat eating festival in the southwestern Chinese region of Guangxi in spite of a global campaign to save them, activists said.
The annual June 21 festival, which is largely commercial in origin, has been the focus of repeated petitions and social media campaigns from within China and around the world since last year calling on authorities in Guangxi’s Yulin city to ban it.
“[The] dogs are captured and transported over long distances under horrific conditions to Yulin,” the Humane Society International said in a petition on its website.
“There, they’re held in crowded cages without food or water until they are killed,” it said. “Often, they are beaten and their throats are slit in front of other terrified animals.”
It added: “Most Chinese citizens reject this practice, and we’re committed to supporting them in changing their laws.”
A Change.org petition calling on Yulin authorities to ban the “barbaric” practice had garnered nearly 1.4 million signatures by 1 p.m. GMT on Monday.
Yulin officials have responded to the campaigns by saying that the festival is a commercial event that receives no public funding or support.
Dog traders have said that dogs are slaughtered humanely, a claim that is hotly disputed by campaigners, many of whom come from a generation born in the 1980s that grew up with family pets, the first to do so since the political turmoil and intermittent starvation of the Mao era.
The HSI website said a similar campaign last year had apparently had some effect, as the number of dogs slaughtered this year appeared to be much smaller.
Xie Jiaye, head of the New York-based Chinese Association of Science and Technology U.S.A., said the ranks of Chinese animal rights activists are growing by the year.
“Calls for an end to the consumption of dog meat are getting louder all the time,” Xie said. “This is partly because of the close relationship between dogs and people, and the fact that more and more people are keeping dogs as pets.”
“I don’t even know … why they still have this dog-meat eating festival,” he said. “It’s as if it is partly out of a sense of defiance.”
