#1 Who Owns the Barking Rights?

Since 2009, the later part of June has become a festive duration for the people of Yulin, Guangxi, but it might not be a joyful occasion for man's best friends. In the 10-day period till the midyear point, over 10000 dogs are cooked with lychees and eaten by people coming to this southern region of China specifically to be able to experience something they cannot find elsewhere. While eating dog meat is not that rare a practice in Asian societies, with major ones including China, Korea and Vietnam, but holding a large-scale event exclusively for the promotion and distribution of a special method to prepare dogs for consumption purposes is something mind-puzzling.

It is believed that dog meat and lychees produce some warming effect in accordance to Chinese medicinal belief of substances having yin and yang properties, of which you can explore on your own here. But that is a minor and often neglected point compared to the huge uproar caused by animal rights activists and netizens in China and worldwide over the very fact that this Yulin festival has been occurring for years, and that it has to be stopped. But does it really?

Let me put it upfront bold and clear: there is naturally nothing wrong with eating dog meat, or any kind of meat at all. The reasons we associate different creatures and species with different functions are all made up, by none other than ourselves, or more correctly our ancestors, who were born into societies made up by their ancestors and so on. At some point along the evolutionary timeline, some members of the homo sapiens species must have looked around and asked the million stone dollar question: what can we eat? Probably anything that moved at the beginning, but after awhile bringing down mammoths with pebbles and pure enthusiasm driven by hunger might prove too daunting and exhausting a task, so they asked the next and more sensible question: what should we eat? This process of reasoning evolved constantly and eventually society reached a moment in which there was a classification of biological beings, with intelligence and without, to which a person can regard as food or not. Evidently this process has resulted in people from different parts and different groups of people from the same part of the world having drastic contrasting opinions on what would be on the dining table, and that is a problem.

There are many reasons some people eat and do not eat some kinds of meat. Religion, culture, tradition, habit, challenge, torture, self-torture, law and regulation, you get the idea. For certain kinds of meat it is not too difficult to come up with universally acceptable reasons for not eating them. Human meat is one of those, for it is murder which is a crime, cannibalism which makes it difficult to maintain healthy relationships with your neighbours, and there would not be any review of it so you would not know if it even tastes nice in the first place. Others are mostly endangered animals, since once they go extinct you cannot do anything with them let alone dissolving their bones with your stomach acid. And for species that have a long history of being domesticated by human such as cats and dogs, the reason is that they are cute and they are our friends. Seriously? Then chickens are agents from hell sent over to disrupt our sleep in the morning and deserve to be chopped into pieces and packed into $5 meal boxes in fast food restaurants?

There is only one thing that differentiates an animal between being fed to us and being fed by us, and it's choice. It is the choice we decide on that ultimately determines another living being's fate, and claiming one choice is wrong and immoral and illogical because it is not the same as ours is pretentious and hypocritical. As a dog and cat owner myself I swore that I would never touch dog and cat meat, but I do not hate people who enjoy those particular kinds of meat and I absolutely would not consider forcing my belief onto them, as long as they are not eating MY dogs and cats. Of course you would become affectionate to your pets and the very thought of them dying in a boiling water pot would be your worst nightmare, but what does it have to do with others?

Most dog meat businesses operate their own farms for supply, much like those for common livestock. They have no emotional connection to the animals they breed, grow and eventually slaughter for sales, so from their point of view there is no issue and they can pretty much sleep soundly at night. "But dogs are adorable and the way they are killed is too brutal". There is no such thing as a humane way to kill a living being for the sake of frying it with onions in sunflower oil. Muslim's classification of haram and halal meat supported by science can somewhat explain what kind of meat we should eat, but that is besides the point. Unless you have been a voluntary vegetarian your entire life, which is also not possible because whoever brought you up has affected your diet and thinking, you are in no position to say it's wrong for someone to eat dog meat, even though it is wrong if they try to eat YOUR dogs. The Yulin dog meat festival should not be banned and protested against, but it is the higher probability of dog theft that manifests as a by-product of higher demand during this period that should receive full attention from official bodies. I do not advocate the practice of eating dog meat, but I am against prohibiting it for the simple reason that it is bullshit.