Why China's dog eating festival makes us lose our appetite

We love dogs. We feel deeply disturbed when some others love them on their plate.

Outrage and protests swept Dublin to Delhi against the Yulin dogmeat festival in China’s Guangxi, where around 10,000 animals are slaughtered for food and allegedly tortured before being killed.

Even Indian movie stars Anushka Sharma, Alia Bhatt and Sonakshi Sinha posted angry, distressed tweets and urged people to sign online petitions to stop the event.

“Animals dont have a voice. YOU do! HELP end this CRUELTY. Sign d petition,” Anushka tweeted on June 18.

But does being cute and friendly make an animal more equal than others? What about billions of other animals slaughtered all over the world? Is it fine for Nordic countries to kill the reindeer, the unicorn-like beauty of the frozen forests, and serve it as traditional food at festivals like Sámi in Sweden?

What about the 1.9 million pigs, bulls, cows and sheep electrocuted, gassed, their throats slit only last month in Britain?

What about the boucherie chevaline of France, specialised butchers who sell nothing but horsemeat? How often have Bollywood stars protested sellers cycling to their chicken shops with hundreds of birds tied up and hanging upside down?

Weren’t we in India raging a few months ago against a beef ban? Is it not disturbing to tie up a cow’s fore and hind legs, slit its throat and leave it to writhe and bleed to death?

And if we extend the argument to that other realm of the living, is it fine to maim or kill plants for food? Researchers at the University of Missouri found that plants can hear themselves being eaten, and respond to attacks as small as an insect bite by releasing defensive gases or juices.

Unfortunately, we still need to hunt, kill and maim for food. Globally, thinking and research on food is still in its infancy. It will be a few years before lab-grown food reaches our supermarkets, still longer — one guesses — for it to taste the way we want it to.

Till then, without exception, every culture is guilty of inflicting extreme pain on fellow living beings. So, the global outrage at China is at the simplest level hypocrisy. Just as it is fine to have a Siskiyou Beef Country Cookoff in California or a Texas Reds Steak and Grapes festival, it is culturally fine for the Chinese to eat dogs.

At a more subliminal level, it is the West’s way of showing up a rising China and the cultural "other" as an unwashed, uncivilized people. It is global political play in the garb of empathy.

The issue reverberates emotionally across the wide world of dog-lovers. But the moral argument against cruelty applies to all kinds of slaughter, in every country and culture, and for animals and all living forms.

Yulin can’t be an excuse to make a virtue of our prejudices, and a vice of our love for a popular pet.