Not dogs, but here’s one example.
Would it be a far stretch to say this happens to dogs in that country as well?
Possibly. We treat dogs and rats quite differently in this country.
But if both are food to these people, why does it matter?
Not all food animals are created equal. Cows and cod are both food animals to us, yet we treat them totally differently.
This is a cogent explanation, but just to elaborate a bit more, we’re talking about lactic acid buildup in the muscles. Yes, the thing that makes you “burn” after a hard workout. The meat industry in western countries try to avoid practices that result in lactic acid buildup in the muscles just prior to slaughter because western tastes dislike the flavor. Eastern cultures on the other hand, LIKE the flavor. That combined with a general disregard for animal welfare allows them to torture animals prior to slaughter and think it’s normal and acceptable. Because it is over there.
As to the question of having evidence that they do this, it’s tricky. The photos and videos weren’t created at a Hollywood film studio, so they’re real. What we don’t know is how commonly practiced it is. I work in greyhound adoption in the U.S. and also galgo rescue in Spain, and we have this same problem in those areas. There are a lot of really horrible photos and videos on the internet but we have found that some of them originated years ago and are continually being trotted out which makes the problem look worse than it might really be. Couple that with the people in those industries (racing in the US and hunting federations in Spain) who flat out deny that those things ever happen and it’s nearly impossible to quantify the truth.
What I have learned from my work, though, is that the only real solution is cultural change. I cannot stop the hanging and torture of galgos in Spain, nor can I prevent dogs from being tortured in China. Only local cultural change can do that, and yes that takes a VERY long time. Education is key and social media is surprisingly a big help. It might be annoying to see those photos shared around Facebook, but it starts a dialogue. In fact, it’s an international dialogue. But just because I live in the US doesn’t mean I feel we are superior to other cultures even while I want us to help educate them. When I was a child, we kept dogs chained in the yard with the chain embedding itself into the neck and animals were not allowed in the house. Dogs and cats were common roadkill. In my one lifetime we’ve changed from that being the US cultural norm to our norm now having housepets and loving them, spending lots of money on their entertainment and preventative healthcare. Spain and other European countries are where the US was when I was a kid in terms of animal welfare attitudes but things are slowly changing there.
Another part of education is that there is a new branch of science called cognitive ethology, which is the study of emotions and cognition in animals. They are now methodically and with scientific rigor building a body of evidence that various species of animals do indeed think, feel and may also have morals and understand concepts like good and bad. That science is in it’s infancy, but there are good books out there describing those studies, written for the general population. I can recommend several if anyone is interested. But as those ideas become embedded into our cultures things will change. Slowly.
The Lobster family is here. They would like to have a word about this topic.
The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit. - Albert Einstein
We should round up all the wild tigers and put them in a zoo where they can only eat meat that was humanely slaughtered.
say for yourself, not everyone is like you.
Many people are vegans for ethical reasons, even knowing that eating some meat is a right thing for optimal health for a human being, so they sacrifice quality of their food and so quality of their health for prevention of cruelty to animals.
For your point the following analogue can be made:
Some men believe (and its even actually true for them), that a brutal rape provides a better quality sex than a consensual intercourse with a willing aroused woman.
What you say is exactly like they have right to rape women, because their belief requires this for better quality sex, and those men who don’t rape women do it only because of their contrary belief - that consensual intercourse provides better quality of sex for them.
And the last, the least significant thing is that quality of meat (how healthy/unhealthy it is for the one who eats it) can be measured with scientific methods, and this has been done, and so western “belief” that better life and death for the animal makes its meat more healthy is not a belief, but the scientific fact.
So eating meat is evil like rape? Im not convinced.
It was an analogue, but if to be honest, these are quite comparable evils. Rape victim stays alive, in distinct of the victim of meat eating, but in some cases suffering for rape victims can be so great that they would have preferred to be killed than raped.
But this was not the point.
Also regarding the animal cruelty - in China animals on fur farms are often skinned alive, which leads to WORSE quality of fur than when animal is skinned several hours after death when the body is cold. Western fur farmers say they never skin animals alive not just from care of them, but because they don’t want low quality furs. So it makes the arguement about meat quality for animal suffering invalid.
Also if Easterners like the lactic acid taste in the meat so much, still there are more humane ways to get it than what they do to animals before death. They could, for example, make dogs run long distance and then shot them in the head, dog would has died instantly but with muscles full of lactic acid.
So there is only one way to explain that horrible cruelty - that people who do it and support it are just plain sadists, enjoying suffering of other living beings.
Eating meat from horribly tortured animal is much worse evil than rape, of course, because rape almost never involves boiling the victim alive or anything like that. Eating meat from humanely killed animal may be less evil than rape because inflicts less suffering to the victim.
I am not going to convince you in anything, just am presenting my opinions here for the like-minded people to let them know they are not alone, for open-minded people to make them think more and gain more info about the issue.
With those who is persistent in defending boiling alive animals capable of feeling pain (from lobsters to apes) i have nothing to talk about.
“…it’s estimated that the total number of dogs eaten in this festival is only 10,000 or so; really small fry in a country with China’s population.”
Looks like they’ll have only 9,600 (or so) this year.
The topic seems to have two sides at least.
First off, animals do not really have rights. We desire to be kind to them as we desire to be kind people. We are opposed to needless cruelty as we do not wish to be needlessly cruel. Animal welfare is a wise policy. Animal rights not so much.
Next of course is the respect we owe to other cultures. We may find Chinese practices towards dogs to be horrible. They may feel the same way about our society. Since I do not want to use force on this matter, it seems to me we can do little but chiding and educating.
The future looks better for China’s dogs. Treating animals well is a trait of rich nations. As the Chinese grows richer, they will most likely change a lot of their culture.
I don’t like it, but I don’t assign too much blame to cultures that eat animals that we consider pets, or even those that we consider more self-aware. That is the culture in which they were raised. They probably don’t consider animals in general on par with human life, nor differentiate sentient from sapient life. One can only hope that they evolve into a more empathetic culture. Positive pressure from more animal-empathetic cultures should be encouraged to hopefully hasten their transition.
Cruelty is another matter. No matter what culture you were raised in, it should be obvious when an animal is suffering and no conscious life-form should be willingly subjected to that. Culture should not be given a pass if they accept and promote animal cruelty, period.
My daughters are strict vegans for animal-rights reasons. They have successfully converted me to semi-veganism. I blame the culture I was raised in (as an older generation American) coupled with personal weakness of conviction that I’m not completely vegan. A world without cheeseburgers is a world I’m not willing to live in…yet. But, I’m happy to be vegan most days of the week and lobby for animal rights.
With the evolution of good-tasting plant-based meat substitutes (some are quite good even now!), it will be more difficult to use taste as an excuse to eat animals.
But, I do have a choice as to the types of animals I consume and to a degree, the manner in which they are slaughtered (to the best of my knowledge). If I believe any animal is slaughtered cruelly, I won’t touch it. Likewise, I won’t eat any type of baby animal because I believe all animals should have the right to experience life for at least some significant period of time (even if it’s just a couple of years). Milk-fed veal is particularly horrendous because not only are the calves given very short lives to live, the lives they are given are cruel (often force-fed milk and kept in very small cages so their muscles don’t hypertrophy and toughen the meat).
I base the types of animals I’m willing to eat on my perceived notion of how self-aware I believe the species is, not on whether it is a pet-type animal. I won’t eat animals that I believe have a high degree of consciousness, like octopuses, whales, or cats and dogs. I believe sapient animals experience suffering to a higher degree than non-sapient species.
The Chinese people who are more enlightened and civilized than their counterparts need to do more to stop this.
Google images of Yulin.
Can Americans please stop this mindless, gruesome and barbaric butchering in their own backyard ?
If dogs are killed (humanely as every animal should be) and their meat eaten, I don’t like it nor condone it but it doesn’t bother me too much.
The sadistic torture is appaling, barbaric and unforgivable. The fact that it is done in name of voodoo pseudoscience makes it even worse.
There’s not much that can be done about it but since I have a hard time psychologically dealing with the torture of animals I just I abhor and despise everything Chinese and it helps a little.
Lo, Barry White is dead.
Don’t bother the snakes.
Leave all the snakes alone.
(aaah yeah)
(Ooh babe)
My darling, I
Can’t get enough of your love, babe
~Max
How about a sport where you trick an animal into biting a hook, use that hook to drag it into an environment where it can’t breathe, rip the hook out, then toss the torn and bleeding animal away?