tagged w/ Dog Meat
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The Washington Post...
Chinese dog eaters and dog lovers spar over animal rights
By William Wan, Published: May 28
BEIJING — The mutts were destined for the dinner table — all 520 of them crammed onto a truck hurtling down a Beijing highway toward awaiting restaurants in northeastern China.
Then, fate intervened in the form of a passing driver, an animal lover who spotted the truck and angrily forced it off the road.
From there, things began spiraling out of control. News of the confrontation hit the Chinese blogosphere, sending more than 200 animal activists flocking immediately to the highway. Traffic on the road slowed to a standstill. Dozens of police officers were called in. Animal activists, however, kept arriving with reinforcements, carrying water, dog food, even trained veterinarians for a siege that lasted 15 hours.
Weeks later, those who were there still talk in disbelief at how quickly things escalated. But in many ways, it was a battle that has been brewing for years between the rural and the urbanites, the poor and the rich — between China’s dog eaters and its growing number of dog lovers.
The standoff last month has sparked the widest-ranging discussions to date in China over animal rights. Pictures and videos from the incident have spawned endless arguments on e-mail groups and blogs, Web polls and news stories delving into each side’s points.
And the debate is the latest sign of China’s rapidly changing mores and culture. For centuries, dog meat has been coveted for its fragrant and unique flavor; it is an especially popular dish in the winter, when it is believed to keep you warm. But pet ownership has skyrocketed in recent years as China’s booming economy produced a burgeoning middle class with both money and time for four-legged friends. And with the new pet stores, a once powerless animal rights movement is slowly gaining traction.
The highway incident has been its biggest success thus far. The mob of dog lovers finally won the standoff by pooling together more than $17,000 to pay off the truck driver. But their victory was quickly eclipsed when they soon realized they had no idea where to house the hundreds of loud, wild and decidedly not housebroken canines.
Even after combining forces, the handful of animal rights groups in the region had trouble handling the overflow from the truck. Most of the dogs they unloaded were strays, and many were dehydrated, malnourished or suffering from deadly viruses. Several have died since the rescue. Dozens this week remained under treatment at animal hospitals around Beijing.
“We are a small organization. We haven’t even tried to pay the animal hospital bills yet,” said Wang Qi, 32, who works at the China Small Animal Protection Association. “There was so much enthusiasm when the dogs were first rescued, but our worry is, what happens now?”
The trucker, Hao Xiaomao, has not fared any better in the aftermath. Reached by phone in his home province of Henan, Hao said he lost a small fortune, more than $3,000, after being forced into the deal. Worst of all, because he failed to deliver, no one has been willing to hire him since.
“I still don’t understand what was immoral about my shipment. People also eat cow and sheep. What’s the difference?” he asked. Of the activists, he said, “They were just a group of rich bullies who own pets and have nothing better to do.”
Several others have also raised the specter of class warfare — a common meme in modern China amid the widening gap between rich and poor. In online debates, many have noted the symbolic nature of the confrontation: a working trucker forced off the road by a black Mercedes-Benz whose driver was on his way to a resort hotel with his girlfriend.
The issue comes with historical baggage as well, notes Jiang Jinsong, a philosophy professor at Tsinghua University. “During the Cultural Revolution, having a pet was seen as a capitalist activity. Only the rich and arrogant had dogs and allowed them to bite poor people,” he said. “So there’s this implication that if you treated pets well, you will treat those who are weaker badly.”
At least one netizen has taken this argument to the extreme. Enraged by activists fighting for animals while ignoring the plight of so many rural, impoverished Chinese, a man in Guangzhou posted threats online to kill a dog a day until animal activists donate the money they raised to peasants living in poverty instead of to dogs.
“I felt I had to do something to represent the grass-roots people,” said Zhu Guangbing, 35, who recently plastered his threat on Twitterlike microblogs in China. “I grew up in a poor village. We raised one dog to watch the door and one to be killed in the Lunar New Year because we were too poor to buy pork. I don’t understand what’s wrong with that.”
Within days, Zhu found his name, cellphone number, office number, and even his parents’ number posted online.
“My parents got calls condemning them for raising a son like me,” he said, having logged more than 200 threats so far. “One elementary school teacher even called me and had her students insult me over the phone one by one.”
But dog activists have defended their fervor as a necessity. China does not have any laws against cruelty to animals, and by some estimates, as many as 10 million dogs — some vagrant, others stolen pets — are sold for consumption each year and are often kept under horrible conditions.
“People are saying it’s a silly thing protecting animals,” said Wang, the activist. “But it is a question of civilization.
“By teaching people in this country to love little animals, maybe we can help them to love their fellow human beings better.”
But Zhu scoffed at that notion. Last week, he was forced to quit his job after his company began receiving threatening phone calls as well.
“I didn’t even intend to kill dogs. I was just making a point,” he said. “The animal activists claim to have the moral high ground, but look at what they did to me. Can they really say they have love at the front of their heart?”
Staff researcher Zhang Jie contributed to this report.The Washington Post...
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Los Angeles Times...
Marine fights Vietnam's dog-meat tradition
Robert Lucius is on what may be his toughest mission: trying to convince the Vietnamese that cruelty to dogs is an idea whose time has passed
Robert Lucius
Robert Lucius has started a nonprofit aimed at persuading Vietnamese people to stop eating dog meat. (December 12, 2010)
By Steve Chawkins, Los Angeles Times
December 13, 2010
More than three decades after the war in Vietnam, a Marine named Robert Lucius had a moment of reckoning on the road to Lai Chau.
A naval attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, he was bound for a rural clinic with a donation of medical equipment.
When his car was passed by a motorbike with a wicker basket full of dogs, he locked eyes with one of them. "There was an immediate sense of connection," he said. "You could see the fear, the dread, the helplessness."
A vision raced through his mind: Liberate the dogs. Have his driver overtake the bike and dig into his wallet — anything to keep them from being served up in restaurants down the road.
Lucius, now 42, did nothing. He didn't, he said, want to be seen as a "cultural imperialist" bent on changing a local custom merely because it offended him. But later that day, after a celebratory meal with Vietnamese colleagues, he saw a dog skinned and splayed out on a restaurant kitchen floor.
"That dog was every dog," he said. "Like a light switch, my life flipped … from darkness to light."
Lucius renounced meat. Then he became a vegan. Now, two years after his return from Vietnam, he has started the Kairos Coalition, a nonprofit aimed at ending animal cruelty and making amends for what he sees as his cowardice on the road to Lai Chau that day in 2006.
Kairos is a Greek term loosely translated as "timely opportunity." For Lucius, who today is a lieutenant colonel and assistant provost at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., that means training young people in Vietnam to stage performances about the immorality of animal cruelty. He calls it "humane edutainment."
Like the wandering "culture and drama teams" that Ho Chi Minh employed to rally support decades ago, the Kairos troupe is being trained to use puppets and masks, songs and dance. The members have put on a couple of events and have more scheduled at schools and universities throughout Hanoi.
The idea is to draw audience members into the action, getting them to think about everyday cruelty.
At a workshop in Hanoi last month, Lucius and two American volunteers gave their players a situation that called for quick ethical thinking: A couple comes upon a suffering watchdog, chained outside a shop with no food or water. After discussing a number of alternatives, the actors decided to pressure the shop owner indirectly — by appealing to his neighbors.
One of the subjects that Lucius and his students discussed was the eating of dog meat. It was a touchy area, he said, particularly because of the torture and beatings suffered by many dogs bound for the table. In Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia, some believe that dog meat enhances the male libido — especially if the dogs are stressed before being killed.
"What we did agree on is that it's unnecessary to treat the animals so cruelly in the run-up to the slaughter," said Lucius, who has received a grant from Humane Society International.
Andrea Nguyen, an expert on Vietnamese cooking, said Lucius' group is fighting an uphill battle in taking on the dog-meat tradition.
"I certainly respect his effort to change people's minds, and Vietnam is indeed changing," said Nguyen, a Santa Cruz cookbook author whose family fled to the United States in 1975.
"On the other hand, there's this whole thing of how wonderful the meat is supposed to taste. Then there's the virility thing, and the fact that it's a longstanding source of protein. He's up against all that."
Dog is not part of everyday cuisine in Vietnam, Nguyen said: "It's nhau — noshing food. It's for when you and your buddies get together on the weekend over some beer, some rice wine, some moonshine."
In Vietnam, as elsewhere, people have consumed dogs and cats in times of privation. But many Vietnamese also have dogs as beloved pets.
"One of my biggest traumas was to leave my dogs behind when I was 11," said Andrew Lam, a Vietnamese American writer based in San Francisco. "We couldn't take them when we fled as refugees."
Lam, whose latest essay collection is "East Eats West," said Lucius' campaign "could be interpreted as a very condescending Western attitude."
"I doubt this one man will be able to change the mindset whatsoever," he said. "I see it as a quixotic effort."
Lucius is an optimist.
"We have a huge animal rights movement here jousting against factory farming, but they're making headway," he said, referring to the U.S. "Some people would say that's quixotic too."
In Asia, he said, local organizations are shifting public opinion against inhumane practices such as extracting bile — a traditional medicine — from the gallbladders of living bears.
As Vietnam prospers and more people have pets, attitudes toward eating dog have changed — but not, Lucius said, fast enough.
He has been a Marine for 22 years, trained to shoot down enemy aircraft and missiles. Then he was selected as a foreign affairs officer for Indonesia and then Vietnam.
In 2008, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals named him "the sexiest vegetarian" in the Marine Corps. He chuckles over the honor, but he's dead serious about the cause: When he retires next year, he may devote himself completely to animal rights.
"My time in the Marines has made me more sensitive," he said. "I've seen how cultures and traditions change over time."Los Angeles Times...
Marine fights Vietnam's dog-meat tradition
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Celebrate Compassion
The 5th annual World Go Vegan Week is taking place this year from October 24th through 31st. This week is a celebration of compassion and a time to take action for animals, the environment and everyone's well-being. A plant-based diet not only improves your health, it significantly reduces your carbon footprint and preserves resources for future generations. So please join me in creating a healthy future and go vegan for World Go Vegan Week.
- Emily Deschanel
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IDA would like to encourage people to use World Go Vegan Week to educate their community about the vegan lifestyle as a compassionate, sustainable, and healthy way of eating and living. Promoting veganism through outreach events and the media, we know that our annual World Go Vegan Week is helping make the word "vegan" a household word, universally recognized as meaning love and compassion for all living beings.
Take the Vegan Pledge [http://ida.convio.net/site/PageNavigator/Vegan_Pledge] and pledge to go vegan for the week of World Go Vegan Week, October 24 - 31. Join other compassionate and inspired people that are changing their diet, changing their life and changing the world! Then, hold an event to celebrate you commitment to World Go Vegan Week.
Here are some ways you can celebrate World Go Vegan Week:
Be sure to register your event with us so we can send you flyers, posters and other materials to make you event a success. Contact Hope Bohanec: hope@idausa.org (415)448-0058.
* Plan an event or activity to get people interested in veganism, such as a public lecture, cooking demonstration, feed-in with vegan food samples, leafleting, tabling, library exhibit, or street theater performance. If you serve vegan food at your event, you can get refunded for the cost through the VegFund
* Host a vegan potluck dinner or restaurant outing to show your family and friends that they don't have to sacrifice taste to save animals' lives. Sharing delicious vegan food with others is a fun and easy way to make a difference in the lives of animals and the people you care about.
* Ask your local natural foods store to offer vegan samples for the week. Ask your favorite local food store to offer vegan samples or specials for the last week of October. Let them know that we can send information, posters and materials to help them celebrate World Go Vegan Week.
* Ask veg-friendly restaurants to offer discounts or specials on their vegan food. Encourage restaurants to have vegan specials for the week or to offer a discount for bringing in a veg-curious customer.
* Show a powerful, short vegan video at your next potluck or social gathering. Here's one of our favorites: Vegan video by NonViolenceUnited.org.
* Host a vegan pie-baking contest. You can do this in your own home in a public place. Offer prizes like gift certificates to veggie restaurants or IDA T-shirts. Don't you want to be a judge? Yum!
* Host a Vegan Halloween Party. Have a costume party and have prizes for the best animal costume, most compassionate, and the most vegan creative! Have vegan Halloween candy and treats on hand and go trick-or-treating, offering folks at the door vegan candy and brochures.
* Students: join or start a vegan club in your school and plan an event with your friends that will educate people about the benefits of a vegan diet to human health, animals, and the environment. Write a paper on veganism, hand out vegan literature at a college campus or help get vegan meals into your school's cafeteria. Visit Choice to learn how.
* Have a well-known vegan author or athlete come speak in your community. Host an event where a famous vegan offers an inspiring presentation. Have vegan treats for folks to try. IDA can help you contact the person.
* Send a friend or family member who lives far away a gift certificate to a restaurant in their own town. Visit Happy Cow for reviews of vegetarian restaurants around the country.
* Write a letter to the editor about the benefits of a vegan diet or the cruelties of factory farming, or ask your local newspaper to write a story on the subject.
* If you are religious, or participate in spiritual services or gatherings, look for opportunities to incorporate the vegan message into the discussions. If you participate in study groups, suggest discussion fo the vegan message.
* Visit a farmed animal sanctuary and take a friend who still eats meat. There are a number of farmed animal sanctuaries where you can visit rescued cows, pigs, turkeys, chickens, ducks, goats, sheep and rabbits live naturally in peace and harmony without fear of abuse or slaughter. Check out Animal Acres, Animal Place, Farm Sanctuary, Poplar Springs Animal Sanctuary, or IDA's Project Hope.
* Encourage a Compassionate Thanksgiving. Since Thanksgiving is coming up in a few weeks, talk to your community food banks about providing vegan options such as Tofurkys. Consider buying a few Tofurkys, preparing them, and bringing them to your food bank or other similar community dinner. Be sure to check out Gentle Thanksgiving which offers a lot of information and guidance on this special observance.
* Share the ideals of veganism with your community of friends and colleagues by adding this quote to your email signature:"Veganism gives us all the opportunity to say what we 'stand for' iin life -- the ideal of healthy, humane living. Add decades of health to your life, with a clear conscience as a bonus." - Donald Watson
* If you are a part of an animal protection organization, become a presenter of World Go Vegan Week. There are no costs to you for joining us as a co-presenter. All you need is to post the World Go Vegan Week banner on your web site, which links to the World Go Vegan Week web page. Contact Hope Bohanec, for more information: hope@idausa.org or call (415) 448-0058.Celebrate Compassion
The 5th annual World Go Vegan Week is taking place this year... more
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By Emily Chang, CNN
March 9, 2010 12:23 p.m. EST
Guangzhou, China (CNN) -- Dogs bark and whine behind high chain-link fences, some of them gnawing the wire so hard they bleed at the mouths while cats packed into crowded cages cower in fear if anyone approaches.
This isn't a pet store -- it's a meat market in Guangzhou, a city in southern China where eating cats and dogs is common practice.
At the Han River Dog Meat Restaurant in central Guangzhou, diners can choose from a long list of menu items, including dog soup, dog steak, dog with tofu and more. In the kitchen, the chef chops up meat for dog hot pot, one of the more popular dishes. Most customers like it spicy.
"Dog meat is good for your health and metabolism," explains Li, the hostess who declined to give her first name. "In the summer it helps you sweat."
Should cat and dog meat be banned?
But these local restaurants may have to find a new specialty. The Chinese government is considering legislation that would make eating cats and dogs illegal.
Professor Chang Jiwen of the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences is one of the law's top campaigners. "Cats and dogs are loyal friends to humans," he said. "A ban on eating them would show China has reached a new level of civilization."
Eating dog meat is a long-standing culinary tradition not just in China, but also Korea. Cat meat can be found on the menu in China, Vietnam and even parts of South America.
The Chinese government has signaled a willingness to take the meat off the market. To avoid upsetting international visitors during the Beijing Olympics, officials ordered dog meat off the menus at local markets. Officials in Guangzhou have warned vendors to stop selling it ahead of the Asian Games which will be held there later this year.
The ban on eating dog and cat meat is part of a larger proposal to toughen laws on animal welfare. Individual violators could face up to 15 days in prison and a small fine. Businesses found guilty of selling the meat risk fines up to 500,000 yuan ($73,500.)
The legislation is gaining support from China's growing number of pet owners. With living standards rising and disposable income growing, more Guangzhou residents are investing in house pets.
"I would never eat dog meat," said Louisa Yong, as she clutches her pet cocker spaniel. "It's so cruel!"
Meat vendors have a different view.
"The dogs you raise at home, you shouldn't eat," said Pan, a butcher who also declined to give his first name. "The kind raised for eating, we can eat those."
Many of the dogs and cats sold for meat are specially raised on farms. But Chang said there is always a chance they're someone's lost or stolen pet.
In anticipation of the new ban, dog and cat meat has become more difficult to find, though some vendors say they will keep selling it as long as they can.
"The legislation will definitely affect our restaurant," said Li. "We'll just wait to see the result."
And it seems restaurants don't necessarily need to change their menus anytime soon. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the law prohibiting cat and dog meat could take as long as a decade to pass. Until then it's a la carte, from the cage into the kitchen.By Emily Chang, CNN
March 9, 2010 12:23 p.m. EST
Guangzhou, China (CNN) -- Dogs... more
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There is a saying amongst Southern Chinese that "anything with four legs, except a chair and anything that flies, except an aeroplane, can be eaten" and nowhere is this more true than in Guangdong Province, where the live animal markets are famed for the astounding variety of animals on sale for human consumption. Dog is a preferred meat, and the cultural belief is that the greater the torture in killing the dog while butchering it, the tastier is its meat.There is a saying amongst Southern Chinese that "anything with four legs, except... more
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Residents of Uganda's capital, Kampala, have expressed shock at the arrest of two men believed to have been passing off dog meat as goat.
The BBC's Joshua Mmali says dog meat is not eaten in Uganda and the subject has dominated radio discussion programmes. Hundreds of people went to the police station where the suspects were being held to express their anger, Uganda's state-run New Vision paper reports. One of the suspects told the paper he had not intended to sell the meat.
"This is my home dog which I have been rearing. I killed it on demand of my spirits who directed me to offer its body parts to them," he was quoted as saying. The men were caught with the carcass of the dog, which had had its head and tail cut off.
"We are investigating information that the suspects own a butchery in one of the city suburbs where they sell such meat," Inspector Bernard Otim told New Vision.
Residents of Uganda's capital, Kampala, have expressed shock at the arrest of two... more
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