Dog meat festival in China takes place despite massive online protest

Up to 10,000 dogs and an unreported number of catswere killedthis year to be eaten Sunday andMondayduring China's annual Yulinfestival but not without an overwhelming amount of resistance.

The Yulin dog meat festival, which officiallylaunched in 2009as a way tomarkthesummer solstice inChina's Guangxi province, has been a target of animal rights activists since itsinauguration.

This year, dozens ofcelebrities, academics andinternational welfare organizationstook up the cause as well, putting more pressure on localauthoritiesthan ever before.

"I was in Yulin late last month," wrotePeter Li, an associate professor of East Asian politics at the University of Houston, in a widelyshared article published by theSouth China Morning post last week. "What I saw was a city in preparation for the annual massacre."

"A slaughterhouse at the city's Dong Kou market had just received a new supply of dogs shipped from Sichuan," he continued."The unloaded dogs looked emaciated, dehydrated and terrified dogs and cats, many wearing collars, displayed behaviour associated with household pets."

Li is one of many animal rights advocates and journalistswho havestated that an increasing numberof the dogs served at Yulinare stolenfrom China's expandingcommunity of pet owners.

As disturbingimagesand videospurported to be shot during festival preparationsstartedcirculating around the web earlier this month,animal lovers took to the internet to express their outrage.

Nearly four million people have signed one petition, created by a Change.org user inOntario, calling upon the governor of Yulin to stop the festival.A different petition fromthe Duo Duo Animal Welfare project has 1.4 million signatures.

Thehashtag#StopYulin2015has been used more than one million times on Twitter this month alone, thanks in partto attention from high-profile social mediausers like Ricky Gervais,Gisele Bundchen and Paris Hilton.

ActorsFan Bingbing,Sun LiandYang Miare among theChinese celebrities who have spoken out in opposition to the festivalonWeiboandYouTube, joining hundreds of thousands in China who have already been criticizingit online for years,according to Time.

Ahead of the festival on Saturday, aretired school teacher from northern Chinareportedlytravelled to Yulin andpaid about 7,000 yuan(approximately $1,400) to save 100 dogs herself. The Guardian reports that the woman, Yang Xiaoyun, alsobought 360 dogs last year.

Despite mounting pressure to put an end to Yulin's dog meat festival, city officialshave been reticent to take action.

In fact, they've been distancing themselves from the controversy altogether, calling the festival"only a local folk custom, without official sanction" in a state news agency report.

"Some residents of Yulin have the habit of coming together to eat lychees and dog meat during the summer solstice," the city's news office wrote on Weibo, according to the BBC."The 'summer solstice lychee and dog meat festival' is a commercial term, the city has never [officially] organized a 'dog meat festival.'"

Dog meat is eaten in some parts of China but is not a common dish, The Associated Press writes, explaining that owning dogs as pets was discouraged under early Communist Party rule.

"The urban value system which sees dogs and cats as companions is becoming more dominant while the more traditional and rural value system that sees animals as tools and sources of income is being challenged," said Li to the New York Times in an interview about the festival earlier this month.

When asked about criticism fromdog meat traders who have said thatstopping the festival could hurt business in Yulin, and that animal rights activists are"introducing a harmful Western ideology into China," he respondedthat "the impact of shutting down the dog meat trade would not be remotely significant for the Chinese economy."

"Opposition to eating dog meat began with the Chinese themselves," he also noted."The bond between companion animals and humans is not Western. It's a transcultural phenomenon."