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After Online Campaign, Chinese Dog Meat Festival Is Canceled
people across the country cheered recently when officials in eastern China said they were doing away with a 600-year-old local custom: the slaughter of thousands of dogs to be eaten at an autumn festival.
The Jinhua Hutou Dog Meat Festival, as it is called, was abruptly canceled last week after local officials were shamed by an online campaign begun by animal rights advocates. Gruesome photographs taken at past festivals that show canine carcasses, some bloody and others cooked, circulated on Chinese microblogs, creating popular pressure against the festival, which was set for October.
Other grass-roots animal-rescue efforts have also gotten results. Last April, a man spotted a truck on a Beijing highway that was packed with more than 500 dogs being shipped to slaughterhouses that supply restaurants in northern China. The man put out a call on the Internet to stop the vehicle, and soon it was blocked by more than 200 people; the crowd rescued the dogs after paying $17,000.
“I believe China is going through a Chinese animal liberation movement, a bottom-up movement, gaining huge momentum in the past year, very much with the help of the Internet and Weibo, together with the younger generation growing up with cats and dogs as family pets,” Deborah Cao, a professor at Griffith University in Australia who studies animal rights law, said in an e-mail interview.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/world/asia/dog-meat-festival-is-canceled-in-china.html?_r=0
The Jinhua Hutou Dog Meat Festival, as it is called, was abruptly canceled last week after local officials were shamed by an online campaign begun by animal rights advocates. Gruesome photographs taken at past festivals that show canine carcasses, some bloody and others cooked, circulated on Chinese microblogs, creating popular pressure against the festival, which was set for October.
Other grass-roots animal-rescue efforts have also gotten results. Last April, a man spotted a truck on a Beijing highway that was packed with more than 500 dogs being shipped to slaughterhouses that supply restaurants in northern China. The man put out a call on the Internet to stop the vehicle, and soon it was blocked by more than 200 people; the crowd rescued the dogs after paying $17,000.
“I believe China is going through a Chinese animal liberation movement, a bottom-up movement, gaining huge momentum in the past year, very much with the help of the Internet and Weibo, together with the younger generation growing up with cats and dogs as family pets,” Deborah Cao, a professor at Griffith University in Australia who studies animal rights law, said in an e-mail interview.
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