Eat your heart out, Yulin
View(s):I thought about eating my dog, just the other weekend. Not that I like dog-meat, or love my canine friends less. But just to see what all the fuss was about. Only those who have been following the furore over that dog-meat festival in China will know what I’m muttering about, and how I feel.
I feel wretched, just thinking about it. Brutal. Beastly. Savage. Now simply multiply that sensation by a million numbers of nauseous, uncivilised, types of sick for a smidgen of my outraged sensitivities. Nothing less would begin to describe the slaughterhouse that is the ‘Yulin Dog-Meat Festival’ (promise me you won’t look it up, dears – just take my word for it that it’s too ghastly, grisly, and gruesome for words).
In 2009, China – the world’s oldest civilisation (no, really, it is) – started up this horrendous canine meat fair. Mistakenly thought to be an ancient tradition, Yulin is a modern menagerie of cool-blooded carnage. Some 10,000 dogs are callously ensnared, carelessly transported, and cruelly killed to be served up as delicacies. Many of them sickeningly done to death in public – an egregious act that has Chinese dog-lovers on the attack. To no avail, it seems. Despite a viral – even virulent – social media campaign, Yulin hasn’t been postponed to date; nor is cancellation envisaged. In 2011, it was taken off the menu, following another Chinese dog-meat festival that was similarly stricken following howling outrage, most significantly in China.
Despite what you may think, dears, the Chinese are several kinds of dog-lovers. No, really, they are. Of an estimated 125-plus million dogs in China, nearly a fifth of these lovelies (25-plus million of them) are reared as household pets. Only a little over eight percent of Chinese who keep dogs rear them for food… the majority of the others who own/keep, train or retain dogs see the furry four-footers as friends or companions (45%), guard dogs (94%), playmates (34%).
Be that as it may, when it comes to Yulin, the world – and China – is divided into two or at most three camps. On the one side are the animal-rights activists, dog-lovers, and general bleeding hearts who are vociferously opposed to the slaughter and brutal treatment of humans’ oldest friend. On the other are the promoters of Yulin – consumers and purveyors alike of dog-meat, some of whom are apparently sickened by the festival and have vowed never to be a part of it again. In the middle (or should I say, out there in outer darkness?) are those who are ignorant and apathetic about the most controversial social-media anti-event of the year… they neither know nor care to know… the less about them, the better, don’t you think!
Shall we choose to see the issue in the light of some principles and values, rather than passion and violence?
Those who are passionately against eating dog-meat in general and dead set against Yulin in particular might argue that dogs are the oldest and closest companions of Homo sapiens; embrace and enhance our humanity; are too warm-blooded, loyal/faithful, useful, and intelligent a species to be so brutally despatched; that it denigrates us to the level of demoniacs to descend into the bloody frenzy that annual Yulin’s violent horrors hold.
Those who espouse the value of the festival cite the principle of cultural relativity where one race’s caviar is another race’s canine meat; where bully-boy America’s beastly beef-tinning industry, say, or France’s cavalier pate foie de gras atrocities, for example, are comparable to the carnage of China’s dog-meat festival. These same might endorse the continuity of Yulin solely on grounds of the West’s loud and hysterical hypocrisy when it comes to the culling of sheep for lamb or slaughtering of calves for veal. (The irony that the largely Western social media’s anti-Yulin campaign being on Facebook – which is banned in China – is lost on many if not most…)
I’m torn, I must admit, rather surprisingly to my friends and family who have known me to be a dog-lover all my life. Yes, the West is hypocritical in the standards it maintains vis-à-vis the meat it sanctions for slaughter and the manner of its culling. Yes, cultural relativity must count for something whereby people from every nation, tribe, and tongue must be free to eat anything they choose to – or choose not to – from sugar and spice and all that’s nice, to snails and eels and puppy-dog’s tails. But no, not puppy-dog’s tails! There must be a common humanity across all the cultures of our race – the human race – that transcends the lowest common denominator? Surely, dogs are it?
So, to counter the cultural relativity argument (“each country, or continent, or race is entitled to its culinary preferences”), I’m going to counter-argue that there must be ‘species-relativity’ to trump our baser appetites. Thus, I can eat Kentucky fried with a clear conscience because I don’t plan on having a living, loving relationship with any chicken (in fact, it’s impossible to envision). And, every creature and cuisine further down the food chain – from eels to escargot to Elephant House lingus – receives similar short shrift from my mental meat-cleaver. But, of course, I’d be the first to admit feeling a tad bit queasy about stomaching lamb with similar aplomb. Oh well, if you’re going to eat once-living things, you might as well be hanged for sheep as for mutton. However, to brutally beat to death dogs that have been culled and transported cruelly as a wanton act of gastronomy is not simply poor hygiene (the possibility of contracting rabies is there), it’s poor humanity (the probability that a person who would eat a dog would eat another human is not unimaginable).
Yulin, if you must eat dogs – euthanise them! If you must murder man’s best friend, do it humanely! You still belong to the human race that civilised dogs… act the part!