Letters to the Editor
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The defenders of China here make me sick.
It's cruelty. It's a universal language, not one that can be excused by culture. This type of behavior is simply primitive by modern standards. We can look at it through the misty eyes of history--ah, the rich grandeur of ancient China!--or through the amoral eyes of the Cultural Defender--who are we to question other cultures?--eyes which have, through history, always excused the messy details and abetted the perpetuation of suffering (which happens all the time in our Land of Denial, the USA).
But let's not let the issue get lost in equivocation and relativism. Cruelty is cruelty, whether it's horribly mistreating cats and dogs, great apes, elephants, livestock, or for that matter, people--human trafficking, mass mutilation in Sierra Leone, Darfur, Congo, genocide of native peoples in the US, child abuse in any one given household anywhere in the world. It's all precisely the same thing--disregard of another being's suffering for one's own selfish gain.
There's no excusing it. Anyone who tries is a dangerous fool.
Personally, I'm glad to see the news of this type of thing, the recent flare-up in Tibet, and other such stories spreading across the media. The Olympics is providing an excellent reminder of how the world has sold its collective conscience for money. China, with the Olympics and a myriad of world trade issues, has been let off the hook for a disgusting assortment of atrocities, both human and animal. Let this be part of a wake-up call that our leaders have sold out their principles, hence our principles, for the sake of their greed and fear.
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Psych-Out
I can't help but think that the parading of the gutted collie was a blatant psych-out of the Americans. I'm sure they knew very well the love we have for our pets, and your love of that dog. It was like saying, "We will consume you, and be stronger for it!"
The worse part about the consumption of animals, to me, is that I feel horrible knowing how animals in this country are raised and slaughtered, and yet, I still eat meat and prepare it for my family. Meat is the centerpiece of my families diet. We eat a lot less of it than we used to, mostly for health reasons, but what will it take for me to, once and for all, remove it from the table?
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A dog lover's viewpoint
I suggest anyone interested in this topic read the excellent book, 'Good To Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture" by anthropologist Marvin Harris. It's a very thoughtful, balanced discussion of what food means to people in different cultures...how one culture can find disgusting, immoral or inhumane what another culture finds perfectly normal and tasty. These cultural beliefs are so intrinsic and deeply held that they can feel as if they are hardwired into us, but in fact, they vary dramatically all over the world. (As the cable shows about "Extreme Eating" demonstrates, as well.)
I'm a westerner and a dog lover, and so for me to eat dogmeat would be about as likely as my cooking and eating my own mother. It would be as bad to me as cannibalism. Nonetheless, there are some cultures where people ARE cannibals, even cultures were people dig up corpses and consume them.
It is easy to forget that many living Chinese people remember times of mass starvation, something no westerner really has experience in centuries. If you are starving, if your children are starving, you quickly revert to being extremely primitive and pragmatic in deciding what you will eat. I would not be able to judge a person who killed a stray dog to feed his hungry children.
But...China is not starving anymore, its a prosperous modern nation, albeit a nation with a very different cultural and economic origins than the US. They don't need to eat companion pet animals for protein anymore, and I think it is likely that actual consumption of dogs and cats is relatively low, and in the process of disappearing as prosperous people tend to own pets, and once you keep an animal of any kind as a pet in your home, you start seeing it in different terms.
It's not realistic to think this will happen overnight. Hopefully the influx of westerners during the Olympics will have all kinds of effects on Chinese culture, and perhaps (very long range), this -- the removal of companion animals from the menu -- will be one of them.
Many of us owe our emotional feelings about dogs and cats to sentimental books and films (beyond what we feel from having them live in our homes). If you want to change conditions in China, there is probably no shorter route than to export sentimental films like Lassie, Old Yeller, etc -- perhaps in new versions, in Chinese with Chinese actors. This method, I assure you, would work better than scolding or lecturing, or taking the attitude "our Western ideas are better than yours".
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Red Herring....or Red dogs and cats.
This piece is such an obvious plant. This is the exact kind of moralistic humdrum we are constantly hearing from the mainstream media. The pattern is completely in line with American policy. We have good trade relations with a country (i.e.- we exploit them, they provide for us) and everything is hunky-dory until our economy starts to shift a little bit, starts to stumble. Then, suddenly, we have to figure out how its not our fault. Someone took our jobs. Someone is importing goods that they shouldn't be, poison toys, poison food, OH GOD ITS CHINA!!-- But wait...China has had the same standards for a while. We've known China has a bad human rights record. We've known their environmental policies are lacking...why is it suddenly at issue now? Could it be attached to the falling value of the dollar, our fear of the emerging economic power of China? No... come on.
And then along comes this neat little story about how, not only when it comes to the environment, not only when it comes to human rights, are the Chinese failing, but look at the fluffy little things they (relegated to simply "they" now, an "other")are willing to put in their evil mouths! God knows we don't treat animals like that, except cows, pigs, chickens, alligators, goats, deer, moose, snakes, racoons, turkeys, and in exceptional cases, horses. But man...Cats and Dogs, thats the bottom of the line...thats abhorrent.
The only thing that is actually disturbing is that some people will see this, extrapolate from our cultural values that eating dogs and cats shouldn't be the norm for them either, and actually be angry over this tripe. If you think the Chinese are bad, look at yourselves. We've only bought their fur (cat and Dog), bought their toys, their garments, and their food, essentially subsidizing their entire economy, for the last thirty odd years. But yeah, now they are a problem.