Chinese Carnival of Canine Carnage Canceled
It’s a great day to be a dog in Qianxi, a coastal township in eastern China.
After 600 years, a festival in which dogs are “chopped alive in the street” and then eaten has been outlawed after public outrage at the very cruel and extremely unusual way in which the animals were massacred, reports Reuters.
According to state-run media:
A folklore goes that dogs in Qianxi were secretly killed by the troops of Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), before they seized the town as the barks would expose their every attempt of maneuver.
After the conquest, dog meat was served at the feast of victory celebration, and thereafter local people began to eat dog meat as a special snack during a temple fair held at a shrine for the emperor and his empress.
In the 1980s, the old-school festival was replaced with a modern commodity fair—but the dog eating remained.
A few years ago, vendors began killing dogs in full public view to demonstrate that their meat was fresh and safe and not “refrigerator-preserved or even contaminated.”
As with pretty much anything of debatable merit these days, the carnival was attacked on social networks and blogs for its arcane practices.
Ninety one percent of over 12,000 users said "No" to the carnival in a vote on Weibo.com, a popular microblogging site in China.
Later, netizens cheered on the government's subsequent ban on the carnival.
"The government's quick response should be encouraged. I hope eating dogs will not be a custom there anymore. It's not a carnival, but a massacre," wrote Junchangzai, a Weibo user who launched an online campaign denouncing the dog-eating carnival. His posts were retweeted over 100,000 times.
Eating dog meat is a long-standing culinary habit in China. Not every citizen has embraced the move to a more dog-friendly country. “It’s our tradition, which the government has no right to ban,” said a villager to a local newspaper.
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