Protests backfire at Yulin dog-meat festival
Print Edition
ANIMAL lovers provoked an angry backlash from residents of a city in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region after protesting a controversial festival yesterday.
Activists have flocked for weeks to Yulin to protest the custom in which locals celebrate the summer solstice by eating dog meat. But their efforts have backfired.
“A lot of people said, ‘I don’t eat dog meat, but just because of these idiots, this year I will,” a 50-year-old animal rights advocate visiting Yulin said.
The activist, who asked not to be named due to sensitivities around the issue, said that outside criticism had “created a sense of confrontation.”
“These outsiders coming in as dog lovers are just troublemakers coming to create unrest,” he cited locals as saying.
Yulin residents traditionally buy live dogs on the morning of the solstice, then gather for dinner to eat them, the activist, from the southern city of Shenzhen, said.
He said he had seen a few dozen other activists show up in Yulin to discourage the practice, sometimes by handing out fliers and holding banners.
Despite their efforts, however, early yesterday more vendors than normal could be seen selling dog meat, and deliveries came in minibuses rather than by motorbike as usual, only to disappear quickly, local media reported.
“The vendors were very busy. Virtually all of them had taken on extra staff,” the Legal Evening News said.
Local vendors denied even being open for business yesterday, however, perhaps reflecting controversy around the issue.
Activists had prepared to hoist signs outside the city government office in the morning — but the protest never materialized, the Legal Evening News said.
A day earlier, dog sellers had goaded activists by holding up their animals and urging animal lovers to buy — and rescue — them, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported yesterday.
It also cited residents as saying: “I didn’t eat dog meat before, but after they yelled at Yuliners the way they did, this year I will definitely celebrate the festival.”
An activist who visited Yulin last week said efforts to change minds had proved futile.
Wang Xiaoyuan, a 35-year-old from the northern city of Taiyuan who travelled with 12 people, said locals had followed her group and warned them not to return.
Yulin authorities have declined to step in, saying eating dog is not illegal — but have suggested restaurants serving such dishes cover the word “dog” on signs, Xinhua news agency reported earlier.
Liang Bojun, one of the first Chinese journalists to write about the festival concluded in 2012 that eating dog is a longstanding custom in Yulin.
It is neither illegal nor immoral, he said.
In contrast, animal lovers claim that dogs are man’s best friend and should not therefore be on the menu.
Zhao Wei, Yang Mi and Chen Kun are among the celebrities calling for an end to the festival. A post by Yang on Weibo was forwarded more than 200,000 times.
Many other dog lovers have cited the issue of food safety — a concern also raised by Liang in his report — as a good reason not to eat dog meat.
Unlike for other meats, there are no regulations governing the slaughter or transportation of dog meat.
In a report by the Dongfang Daily, Quan Xinbin an official with Yulin’s disease prevention center, said about 9 percent of all dogs in the city carry the rabies virus.
Xie Jinghui, an official with the Yulin Food Safety Committee, said authorities are caught between a rock and a hard place as to what action to take.
He said also that the festival was started by local people, not the government, a point reiterated in an official statement from the Yulin government.
Local authorities cannot ban the consumption of dog meat because there is no legal provision for it, Xie said.
Instead, the government plans to propose healthier eating habits to local people, while also trying to educate them about animal protection, he said.
Liang said the Yulin festival increased in popularity after the closure in 2011 of the Zhejiang Jinhua dog meat festival, which had run for more than 600 years.
The Yulin festival is now the only one of its kind in China.
Animal protection groups, including the Humane Society International, have been very active in Yulin recently.
“At the end of what had been an emotionally exhausting day for our team in China witnessing terrified dogs waiting to die, they came across these puppies crammed in a cage tied to the back of a motorbike. Like all puppies they are full of energy and life, but they were so close to death. Now they are our little Yulin ambassadors,” said Wendy Higgins, communications director of the Humane Society International in the UK.
Interviewed by China News Service, Zhou Keda, head of the Institute of Sociology at the Guangxi Academy of Social Sciences, said the whole discussion of whether or not people should eat dog meat shows the diversity of value systems.
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