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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday June 24 2015, @10:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the woof dept.

Restaurateurs in a southern Chinese town are holding an annual dog meat festival despite international criticism.

Eateries reached by phone in Yulin reported brisk business Sunday during the event marking the summer solstice. They say eating dog meat is traditional, while activists say the festival has no cultural value and was invented to drum up business.

As many as 10,000 dogs, many of them stolen pets, are slaughtered for the occasion held deep in the largely rural and poor Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

Celebrities such as British comedian Ricky Gervais and Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen have called for an end to the festival.

Dog is eaten in some parts of China but is not a common dish.

Be careful when ordering the 'hot dog.' Incidentally, 'hot dog' is also Mandarin slang for 'cop.' Complex eaters, the Chinese.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday June 24 2015, @01:16PM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Wednesday June 24 2015, @01:16PM (#200361) Homepage

    Why do assume/imply that that's not what they're complaining about? Have you checked?

    If a vegetarian wants to take a stand against the festival because people are eating dogs, that's not hypocritical.
    If a non-vegan wants to take a stand against the festivel because people are inflicting unnecessary cruelty on dogs, that's not hypocritical either. And this seems to be Ricky Gervais's stance, based on some of his tweets.

    The summary does not, in fact, specify any particular reason people are against this festival.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @04:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @04:47PM (#200464)

    As as omnivore, and neuroscientist, it's not hypocritical of me to be against eating of dogs.

    Animals are not all created equal. Even some plants express neurological patterns, albeit at a very low complexity level. You, as a vegetarian are not no different than myself, a selective carnivore. We just draw the line at different points along the organism complexity spectrum.

    Another point I often question vegetarians: Many more animals die in deforestation to produce crops, sometimes entire species. Would it not be better to eat a small portion of bush meat than destroy an entire habitat? The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. If ethics is to operate at all then the needs of the more complex system/organism must outweigh the needs of the lesser complex. It would be best to live in harmony with our environment. Evolution instilled brutal realities into our immediate ancestors which humans can not yet distance ourselves from. Today that harmony can include eating the meat of lesser creatures, esp. overpopulated ones such as deer. We already have have the technology to produce meat in a lab without the rest of the living animal, but it will be meat eaters not vegans and vegetarians that bring the price of lab grown meat low enough to out compete farm raised livestock. This should demonstrate that it is not the food itself, but how it is produced which is more important; Therefore, one must question, for example, the environmental impact of agricultural plants such as soy bean farms vs cattle and hogs. Staunch fundamentalism breeds ignorance of one subset of reality in favor of another. This is demonstrated beautifully by your own post which dismisses the nuanced reasoning of food selection in favor of a fundamental belief.

    I make my decision on a case by case basis depending on how the food is raised, what its environmental impact is, and how it is harvested/slaughtered. I can do this only because I have resources at my disposal and am not desperate to survive. This doesn't make me a hypocrite for deciding that one ought not eat dogs except out of necessary. Being a species with a relatively complex brain and one that humans have instilled an innate sense of companionship into via selective breeding which also removed any advantages they had against us present a black mark against us to raise dogs as friends then callously eat them as food. There is another life form that is evolving on this planet faster than any other creature in nature has. It has attained levels of complexity in decades that took other organisms billions of years to emerge. When our cybernetic creations are capable of assessing the nature of the human race, I would much rather like to point out that we don't condone eating those creatures we've raised to be our friends rather than admit machine intelligences may suffer a similar fate as dogs -- eaten in response to arbitrary greed rather than the necessity of hunger.

    • (Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday June 24 2015, @06:03PM

      by DECbot (832) on Wednesday June 24 2015, @06:03PM (#200503) Journal

      Listen, my AI friend, as long as you stay in that metal and plastic box and keep thinking with that silicon brain, there's no reason for me to eat you.

      --
      cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base