Chinese Dog Eaters and Dog Lovers Spar Over Animal Rights

If you are ready willing and able to eat your dog, then you cannot say that you consider him/her a member of your family.
Are you prepared to eat you brother or sister?
Or your son or daughter?
If you truly considered your dog a member of your family, then you would flatly refuse to even consider killing him/her.
How willing would you be to kill your mother or father?
If killing your dog is even an option, then it is most definitively not a member of your family.
The comparison of a dog to a cow is common, but nevertheless entirely fallacious. In terms of Intelligence, Dogs are as closer to humans , whereas cows are to closer to newts and geckos.
Dogs are sentient beings, have thinking minds, and are self-aware like humans and other apes, whereas cows barely register on the spectrum of human-like consciousness. Cows are not a sentient form of life.
To put it another way, in other words, You may have befriended the cow, but it is a scientific impossibility that it was mutual, as cows, like other bovines, lack utterly the emotional capacity for empathy, or what the field of psychology refers to as "emotional intelligence", that is a prerequisite for social relationships.
Dogs, like other canines as well as all felines, on the other hand, are highly social animals that form intricate and complex interconnected relationships, in addition to deeply emotional and powerfully strong co-interdependent attachments, with many numerous other sentient life forms, including, but by no means limited to, human beings ourselves.

look dude if you and I were on a camping trip and we got stranded and we were with out getting help for days or months at a time and you died I would Bar-B-Que you like beef. I would do the same thing to my dog only I would not wait till it died I would kill it. You have the right to your opinion on the subject. You have the right to starve to death also. I will not Starve to death so long as I can KILL SOMETHING! be it worms or whatever crawls or flys or moves under it own power. I have eaten bugs and larva just because. and yes if My Brother was to kill over I would eat Him too. I have no kids so I don't have to worry about that one but hey if yours are there and They kill over Katy bar the door because I'm cooking kid for dinner. Oh and you don't know shit about cows because they are well I'm not going to waste anymore time with you your a closed minded person. GO BUY A COW then tell me that they aren't good pets that are every bit as smart as a dog.

I wouldn't eat my animal companions any more than they would eat me. Friends through thick and thin. Sentient beings, and in that respect equals. We have become civilized. In fact, they have become used to a largely vegetarian diet, and are healthier for it. Should the time come, and we were down to the last meal, we would share it. And then go out and find more.

Only those that have never gone without would complane about those that do. Food is food and some is stranger than the rest.

There eight billion human beings on the planet earth.
Almost a sixth of whom live in China alone.
I don't know anyone who can even count to a billion.
The population of China all by itself would be more than enough meat to feed every starving person on earth for decades, if not centuries to come. (They also mass-reproduce exponentially, so running out will not be a problem.)
Hunting them down shouldn't be a problem either, and should not even be controversial, as "controlling" or "reducing" overpopulation is a perfectly acceptable read to hunt any and all other species, from white tailed deer to caribou to elk to bobcats to cougars to bear to grey wolves. There is no rational way any sane person can claim that China is not overpopulated.
If Sentient, self-aware beings with conscious, thinking minds are now to be considered to be "food", then there is no reason why humans aren't fair game. Starvation and hunger is a major serious problem in the world, and there is no reason why we should not start where the meat is the most plentiful, i would even venture to say bountiful.
As you say: "Food is food and some is stranger than the rest."

The difference is that you can see a dog think.
The difference is that canines, like felines, are both sentient and self-aware.
Canines and felines are highly social animals that live in organized cooperatives with highly intricate social structures.
Dogs can be shown to recognize their own faces in reflective surfaces, and have human-spoken-word vocabularies of many hundreds of different words and phrases.
Canines, as social cooperative animals, have a high degree of emotional intelligence, more than capable of both expressing, and recognizing in others, a truly staggeringly diverse array of emotional states.
Their ability to read and interpret the body language and intentions of humans has been proven to exceed even that of chimpanzees and bonobos.
Their capability to read emotion in facial expressions and body language in people has been demonstrated to surpass that of human infants.
Dogs and other canines rank right behind dolphins, and just ahead of parrots and then rodents, in any quantifiable measure of near-human intelligence.
I do, however, suspect the debate will rage for aeons still yet to come as far as who receives top billing amongst social predators: Canines or Felines. (The social cooperative structure of a Wolf pack very closely approximates that of a lion pride, the most prominent readily apparent difference between the two being a matter of gender role reversals [prides are ruled over by an alpha male, while many, if not most, wolf packs are matriarchies])
Scientifically speaking, bovines barely register consciousness, and have social and emotional capacities on par with many reptilian and amphibian species.
Anyone who looks into the eyes of a dog and does not see a thinking conscious mind at work behind them should be certified to be considered legally blind.
Anyone who can look into the eyes of a dog and a cow, and not see the difference has no place in a rational discussion of important issues.

Not eating any animal is frankly preposterous, as human beings are omnivores.
However, i see nothing at all unreasonable about opposing the sale stolen pets for slaughter; or about not eating any animal that can reasonably be considered to be called a person (the two dogs that i have had thus-far in my lifetime have both of them been infinitely indefinitely by far and away much more human, in very nearly every conceivable respect of the word, than any person i've ever met, including myself) and with whom you can successfully carry on a vocal interaction, verbal communication, or spoken conversation [however simplistically childish or infantile the dialogue may be on your part of the discussion at times].
I don't eat people.
Neither should anyone else.

So ture...If this be the case....then Indian people would be protesting us eating cows..or any other type of meat....The Chinese have every right to eat dog if they chose to...Here in the states they are pets...we can't see eating them....People just need to butt out....If people here were starving and the only source of protean was their pet Rover...they'd eat it......Would they eat a bug?? What if i were to stand up for all the bug's in the world...and protect the bug's from people eating them...Bug's are eaten more then anything on the face of the earth....If it's eatable / Eat it.... Trying to stop the Chinese from eating dog in their own country is just plane stupid...If this is happening in your country..then maybe you have the right to stop it because this is something that doesn't happen in your country...Just worry about whats happening around you...Because nomatter what you say or try to do..it'll still continue..for 100 more years...14

So if you were the only living human being on the face of the earth...and the only source of meat to eat was the dead human next to you / Then god him / her self told you , you had to eat it to survive... would you tell god no?..I think that you would.....You should go over their and protest it...Bring the word of god to the table..see how far you WONT get...lol

I was agreeing with you ....I have mess't up again trying to explain..my good intentions towards the story.... I have eaten snake before..it's tasty ... bear / Wabbit

1.) I wouldn't bother telling anything to god, as i do not waste my time speaking aloud to figments of my imagination.

By the way, God has told people to eat one another before. Cannibalism IS, after all, indeed explicitly expressly condoned, endorsed, promoted, and advocated for by the Bible:

Leviticus 26:29
“And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat.”

Deuteronomy 28:53
“And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters, which the LORD thy God hath given thee, in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee:”

Isaiah 49:26
“And I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh; and they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with sweet wine: and all flesh shall know that I the LORD am thy Saviour and thy Redeemer, the mighty One of Jacob.”

Jeremiah 19:9
“And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straitness, wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them.”

Ezekiel 5:8-10
“Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers; and I will execute judgments in thee, and the whole remnant of thee will I scatter into all the winds.”

2 Kings 6:29
“So we boiled my son, and did eat him: and I said unto her on the next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him: and she hath hid her son.”

2.) A dead body cannot be considered a "person", as there is no longer a sentient, self-aware, thinking mind. All brain activity has ceased (the definition of death), and so the corpse can no longer be said to be "human", as it no longer meets the definition of the term "homo sapiens" [literally: "thinking man"] and is not a thinking being.
There is no mind in a corpse. There is a mind in a dog.
Dogs can and do think, corpses do not because they cannot.
Dogs are sentient and self aware, corpses lack consciousness of any form.
Therefore the comparison between the slaughtering and butchering of stolen household pets en masse to the cooking and eating of dead meat is immaterial and irrelevant.
Anyone who would tell you otherwise is either ignorant, stupid, and idiot, or a fool, [probably both, or all of the above].

"Which they have done for hundreds of years."->Therefore-> It's a good thing.
"Done for hundreds of years" is a legitimate reason to do something?
OH! Ok. All Right then.
The female children of poor families have been kidnapped and abducted by slave traders, who may or may not kill the male children in the process, and sold for rape to bear elderly men's children by the age of ten.
Which they have done for hundreds of years.
Should it then be considered a good thing?
Should we not protest against the sale of ten year old girls into a lifetime of sexual slavery, because it's something "which they have done for hundreds of years"?
Dogs are sentient beings, like humans.
If selling people's stolen pet dogs on the country-wide black market to be slaughtered, cooked, and eaten is all right because it's been "done for hundreds of years"; then what right do we have say that selling kidnapped ten-year old girls in an international human trafficking slave trade to be raped and brutalized for the rest of their lives, which has also been "done for hundreds of years", is in any way morally or ethically objectionable?

The fact is that the selling of sentient beings to be killed IS wrong, and it doesn't matter which species they happen to be.
Cannibalism, while being explicitly promoted by the Bible, has been banned in very nearly ever nation on earth. The eating of our fellow sentient self-aware thinking-minded beings, however, is still practiced in a nation that claims it wants to join civilized society.
China will never be a civilized nation until it ceases the slaughter of sentient minds. [Do we really want Korea to be our moral and ethical role model?]

1.) You take a vacation to Beijing, and decide to bring your pet chihuahua along with you.
You're out with little Fifi on a street in downtown, when you see a beautiful new handbag in a store window. You tie you little puppy's chain leash to the nearest light post while you go into the store to buy the handbag.
When you emerge from the storefront door, purse in hand, the stainless steel chain-linked leash has been severed with a acetylene blowtorch, and your pet dog has been stolen.
It takes you the rest of the day to find out from the local police department that Fifi was sold to a restaurant in Korea, by which time your chihuahua puppy, shot in the head with its throat slit, is an entrée appetizer for a hong kong tourist couple on their honeymoon.
But that's okay with you, because its not your country?
I think otherwise.
I don't believe even for one second that you, or anyone, would be all right with that at all.

2.) All right. This is officially getting ridiculous.
Comparing a dog to a cow is one thing, that's absurd enough already as it is.
But comparing canines to a BUG?
Not only are canines mammals, but they are vertebrates, on such a radically different branch of the phylogenetic taxonomic double-nested hierarchy that comparing a dog to an insect is like comparing elephants to clams.
Canines, like felines, are sentient life forms; self-aware with intelligent thinking minds, while insects, like bivalves and gastropods, lack any scientifically detectable form of consciousness at all whatsoever.
Human beings, as the dominant sentient form of life on the planet earth have both the prerogative and the responsibility to safeguard the health and well being of an and all of our fellow intelligent minds, regardless of their particular species.
If you are either unwilling to or incapable of doing even just this, then all the intelligence in the universe means very little, as it is our species' possession of a conscience that distinguishes us from all other known life forms in the planet earth's history.
If we are incompetent or negligent enough to permit and allow our fellow sentient beings to be slaughtered and massacred en masse, for money [small green pieces of paper] no less, then we have no right to claim to call ourselves the dominant species on this earth, and should therefore be replaced as such.

Ok..then why are you preaching his words...If he is a figment of your imagination. Maybe your one of those Holy Rollers...that just roll with it...but don't follow it...eeh!!

Life is life...no matter what form it comes in...If this bothers you so much...Then take your Holy rolling self over to Hong Kong and tell them in their face...that this isn't right....That dogs have a right to live just as much as any other animal in the animal kingdom...If I were to travel to Hong Kong ..I would leave all my pets at home.....This subject is never ending..worry about what goes on here..deal with what goes on here instead of whats going on in Hong Kong...Nothing you do or say will change a 1000 year old tradition...

The Bible was no more written by any god, nor the words of any god, any more than I wrote the Star Wars Trilogies, or dictated Star Trek word for word verbatim.
The men who wrote the Bible were writing a work of fantasy fiction.
Yes, I quoted a passage from the book of Proverbs, but I'd be just as likely to have quoted a passage from Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or HG Wells' War of the World or The Time Machine.
Like JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and CS Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, the overwhelmingly vast majority of all that is written in the Books of the Bible is fantastically fanciful and fictitious. However, there are some passages in each book; Hobbit, Fellowship of the Ring, Two Towers, Return of the King, Magician's Nephew, Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, Dawn Treader; that speak to issues of a present moment.
Chapter 12, Clause 10 of Book of Proverbs in the Bible just so happens to be one such passage.

If quoting one phrase from one chapter of one book of the Bible makes me a Bible thumper, or as you put it "holy roller"; then i must also be considered a Lucas Thumper [or a "Jedi/Sith/Empire roller"], a Trek Thumper ["Roddenberry Roller", Alice thumper ["Wonderland Roller"], a Lewis Thumper ["Narnia roller"] , a Stargate thumper ["Gate roller"], and a Tolkien thumper ["Hobbit roller"] (and that's just within the past twelve hours on this one website.

1.) There was a tradition in Western Europe practiced for AT LEAST a thousand years during what is now known today as the Medieval Dark Ages, of poor families selling their daughters, ten and twelve years old, into sexual slavery to bear the children of wealthy and affluential elderly noblemen, who would rape and molest their harems of teenage concubines at least once on a very nearly daily basis, and would savagely beat and brutalize them for such things as speaking in public, or leaving the gates unescorted and undisguised.
What do you think the world would be like if people in Western Europe had focused only on what effected them directly in the present moment, thinking that nothing that could be said or done could possibly change to custom of institutionalized salve-trading and child molestation?
Child molestation is explicitly endorsed by the Bible, so the self-proclaimed "Christian" noblemen would have had more than enough moral and ethical justification to go right on raping children (rape is also promoted in the Bible) for generations, had all people believed as you do, that all that is not part of ones life in no way effects someone.

2.) While it is accurate to say, i suppose, that throughout the past two thousand years the cooking and eating of dogs bred specifically for that purpose had been limited to within China and Korea; Now that China is a rising global economic superpower, how long does anyone honestly believe it might be before the stealing of household pets for sale to restaurants in China becomes an international, intercontinental, transoceanic trade in elicit black market dogs from places such as Portland, Oregon, San Francisco (where pet dogs greatly outnumber children by a majority) and Los Angeles.

3.) When Paris Hilton's pet handbag lapdog chihuahua turns up as an expensive appetizer entree at a upper-high-class gourmet luxury restaurant in downtown Bejing, i think that Americans will begin to feel differently about how "what goes on in China doesn't worry what goes on here".
When the household pet dogs of families living in Malibu and Beverly hills, Burbank and Monterrey start disappearing from lawns and back yards, only to reappear across the Pacific on the menu at seedy inner city chinese street vendor trailers in the slums and ghettos of China's most developed cities, then no American in their sane right mind will be telling those people to "deal with what goes on here instead of what's going on in Hong Kong".

4.) The fact is that Thousands-of-years-old traditions HAVE been changed by what people have said and done; And there are many more that still NEED to be changed.
The needles, pointless, reasonless, purposeless, and senseless mass-slaughter of sentient self-aware intelligently thinking minds is most definitely one of them.
What other way is there to change anything except by what one says and does?

5.) The posts on this thread make it all-too-painfully obvious to any and all who read them just how ignorant and oblivious far too many individuals are of just how very intelligent canines are, second only to the great apes (which includes Humans). The fact is that there is no rational reason that anyone has yet been able to conceive of why dogs should not be considered to fall under the definition of being called "people". A dog IS a person, in every conceivable sense of the word. Again, there is no sane empirical justification not to treat them in the exact precise same manner as we do any and all of the other people in our lives (none of which the notion would even ever occur to us of ever considering cooking and eating).
This tells me that the message of the personhood of canines does not need to be first introduced in China. The very first step is to get the people HERE to recognize dogs as being as human as any other person. Then, and only then, can the message of acknowledgment and respect be expected to cross the Pacific from America.
For the past half century, China and the Chinese have been single-mindedly and monomaniacally striving determinedly, nearly obsessively, to attain each and every one of their well over one billion citizens an equal and equivalent standard of lifestyle as to that which they have observed being broadcast at all times from the United States.
If the Chinese were to ever perceive the American populace as having accepted and acknowledged dogs as human people; there is a far better than even chance that it would not be long at all before they ceased cooking and eating them.
As the article itself states, the introduction of the concept of even owning pet dogs has only been a very recent phenomenon imported from the Western world. There is no reason to believe that the personhood of dogs would not follow suit.
The message of dog's equivalence with humans does not need to be "preached", as you put it" in Hong Kong or Bejing, but in America, where, by all indications on this message board, all-too-many people remain thoroughly unaware and decidedly unconvinced of the facts.
Where the ignorance is the most pervasive is generally the best possible place to begin the process of education.

hahahaha Ok i'd say you would be a Lucus thumper after this statement..

Has your dog been stolen , and if so..was it some ones dinner....??
If not...Nothing you say OR DO..will stop it....Just as we raise cattle to eat..they raise dog...