Dog meat on sale ahead of the dog-eating festival in Yulin. Animal welfare advocates have called for an end to the event.Credit China Network/Reuters
Animal rights advocates say they have seen signs that the southern city of Yulin is trying to lower the profile of its much-criticized dog-eating festival. The feasting is expected to go ahead as scheduled this weekend, but local officials have taken steps to deflect outside attention from the annual event, at which thousands of dogs are consumed.
The Yulin city government has declared that it is not a sponsor of the festival and that it will strictly enforce food safety regulations. “In recent years, a few people in Yulin would get together on the summer solstice to eat dog meat and lychees, to the extent that it’s gradually become a culinary tradition,” the government said in a somewhat dismissive statement on its website. “This so-called ‘Summer Solstice Lychee and Dog Meat Festival’ is just something individual businesses and people have come up with, and in fact this holiday doesn’t exist.”
Efforts to play down the event have even affected advertising in Yulin, which is near the Vietnam border in the Guangxi region. Animal welfare advocates and domestic media have reported that some restaurants and stalls selling dog meat have removed the character for dog — 狗 (pronounced “go”) — from their signs.
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Cages at a dog slaughterhouse. China has a history of eating dog meat, particularly in far southern and northern regions.Credit Humane Society International
Peter Li, a political science professor at the University of Houston-Downtown and a China policy adviser for the Humane Society International, said that during a three-day visit to Yulin last week, preparations for the dog meat festival at local restaurants and slaughterhouses seemed muted. “The government is trying to suppress this because of mounting pressure from across the country, across the world and also pressure from the provincial government,” he said.
China does not have animal cruelty laws, and there is a history of eating dog meat, particularly in far southern and northern regions. The dish is not commonplace, though. The country also has a growing and increasingly vocal population of pet owners, who have spoken out about heavy-handed restrictions on dog ownership and sometimes brutal and arbitrary enforcement of the rules.
The dog meat trade has become a key target for Chinese animal rights advocates. In 2011, a group blocked a truck transporting nearly 500 dogs to a slaughterhouse and paid $18,000 to free them. That same year another dog meat festival in eastern China was canceled because of public pressure. On Tuesday, a group of about 30 people, mostly older women, held banners condemning the festival outside the Yulin city representative office in Beijing. The group also submitted petitions signed by about 40,000 people, mostly overseas Chinese, calling for an end to the festival, an organizer said.
In their campaign, animal rights advocates have emphasized food safety threats stemming from the unregulated nature of the trade in dogs and cats for meat in China. Because formal breeding for food is limited, strays and pets are nabbed to fill the demand in places like Yulin. Slaughterhouses are not closely inspected, and dog traffickers sometimes use poison to kill their quarry, posing a risk to the eventual consumer.
Although festival-related activity in Yulin has been relatively subdued, consumption of dog meat has by no means stopped. Xinhua, the state-run news agency, reported that some residents held a dog meat banquet a week early to avoid activists and journalists. And Mr. Li said that he and his colleagues found a site outside the city center where dogs were being moved from trucks into small cages on motorcycles so they could be transported into town less conspicuously. They also visited a slaughterhouse where dogs were being butchered in the middle of the night.
“We got very close to the gate, but we couldn’t go inside,” he said. “We could see dogs being selected, we could see the butcher with the knife and of course the hair-removal machine running all the time. Every few minutes we heard a dog wailing in a very sad way.”
