About five years ago, when I was backpacking through Vietnam, I had one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. I was in Sa Pa, a town in the mountainous region near Vietnam’s border with Laos, waiting for one of several buses that would take me to the landlocked land of the limestone karsts. I noticed a beautiful German Shepherd dog across the street.
Not 10 seconds after I first saw him, a man approached the dog and beheaded him with a blunt kitchen knife. I didn’t see the whole show, but it couldn’t have taken more than a minute. The dog didn’t even scream.
As traumatic as it was, the show resolved an issue that I long assumed was a racist stereotype: yes, people in some parts of Asia eat dog meat. And while the episode in Sa Pa suggested a kind of discretion regarding the consumption and harvesting of dog meat in Vietnam, people in other parts of Asia, namely southern China, are more shameless about it.
The Yulin Dog Meat Eating Festival
Yes, you read that correctly: a dog meat festival. The festival takes place annually, in the city of Yulin, in southern China’s Guangxi Province (which, by the way, borders Vietnam) on the summer solstice. There is no obvious reason why the dog is on the festival menu, save for tradition, a fact that makes the festival’s opponents (that is, most of the rest of the world) even more upset.
Locals (and even some strangers) argue that Westerners in particular are hypocrites, as many of them eat the meat of other animals. They think it is silly to single out people who eat dogs, simply because so much of the world chooses to have dogs as pets, rather than pigs, cows, or chickens.
An interesting fact about the Yulin Dog Meat Eating Festival is that while locals often cite “tradition” as a reason for eating dogs, the festival itself only dates back to 2009.
The impact of social media on dog eating: is the end near?
Whether or not Guangxi residents have a point about their critics’ hypocrisy, and regardless of how long dog eating has been a part of their tradition, the attention that the 2015 Yulin Dog Meat Eating Festival received on social media Social media attracted international attention, with celebrities and even politicians around the world using their platforms to condemn the festival and call for an end.
It is too early to know for sure whether this global pressure will require the Yulin Dog Meat food festivals to be canceled in subsequent years, but some in the media believe the days of the festival may be numbered. Many cite dramatic reductions in the number of dogs killed: 10,000 in the early years of the festival; to 5,000 in 2014; to less than 1,000 in 2015.
The local government even officially withdrew its support for the festival, which it originally promoted with pride, under the assumption that it would increase tourism to the province. Only time will tell if the campaigns against the festival will have a long-term impact, but dog lovers around the world are hopeful.
