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| dogs cooked alive |
Today's economic giant China has places where dogs are baked alive. For any civilized individual, it will be hard to find the right words for this practice, for it is so terrifyingly that it is difficult to find words to describe just how awful it is.
The practice of cooking dogs while they are alive is being reported occasionally from China. Last year, Green Prophet published a story on stray dogs being cooked alive in Eastern China. The post had photos of a small homeless puppy being lured toward a woman who was shown in the next photo to be holding the dog by its neck in tongs and cooking it over fire.
A post in the Data Lounge noted that this kind of cooking, which obviously is extremely cruel, dates back thousands of years in Chinese history – a kind of culinary tradition. The Eastern Chinese city of Kengkou is particularly infamous for this, as the photos of the story making the news were taken from there. But the practice exists, as a sore on the burdened existence of insensitive human hunger.
The writer of the Data Lounge post noted that while in places where consuming dogs for food is taboo, such practice indeed sounds cruel. Yet, when reviewed in the context of all the animal bloodshed and cruelty to animals in the West and other parts of the world, it will become difficult to condemn the Chinese alone for what they do to dogs. In a world where a living, breathing animal, capable of feeling pain and emotions and as much part of nature in that sense, according to science, as humans in response to that pain, animal activists tell us it is important to examine what happens to cattle, pigs, poultry, and other animals that are killed for consumption around the world. Many people maintain they are also treated cruelty. Therefore, one may ask why indict just China for animal cruelty? Still China's particular way of treating dogs is a high profile example of the worst in preparation of meat for eating. Animal activists object to these practices that are worldwide. While many people eat meat, most would not want animals to be subjected to cruelty in the process of preparing that meat.
Animal activists see cruelty to animals and the killing of them as a "source of protein" to justify their killing as insensitive. But burning dogs alive is especially cruel and a reminder that the practice goes beyond the ordinary. And what has been China's response? According to CNN reporter Anna Coren who covered a dog meat festival in China this past June, the participants there declared, as noted in her headline, "It's our culture, and we won't change."
Activists are asking that President Obama persuade China to end the cooking of dogs alive, a particularly cruel way to kill an animal for food, and petitions are available, including one by Linda Camac, for readers and activists to express their outrage that in the modern world animals are treated so badly. It is a matter of humanitarian concern.
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The above represents substantially the original author's point of view, edited for grammar and usage, but also with an insertion of the Editor of this publication that offers the meat eaters concerns as well, especially in response to animal cruelty. The article has also been updated with facts from 2014, after the original writer left this publication.
