Petition denouncing the Chinese dog-eating festival is flawed

June is a bad time for dogs in Yulin, China.

One of the ways the city celebrates summer solstice is with a festival — of dog meat. This year an estimated 10,000 dogs were sent to slaughter. The festival is a juicy target for Western keyboard vigilantes.

Various celebrities have voiced opposition to the festival, along with 1.5 million others who signed a Change.org petition calling for it to be stopped. The petition, sponsored by U.S.-based Duo Duo Animal Welfare Project, claims the dog meat festival is barbaric.

The reality of agriculture is that animals will be killed for consumption. Ethical problems should arise over the animals’ welfare, not the species chosen for harvest. Cultural standards decide what species are okay to eat; a global moral checklist that determines what qualities make certain animals exempt from consumption doesn’t exist. Cows, pigs, dogs, horses, rabbits, etc., are all able to learn tasks from patient training. Dogs are absolutely not unique in this, nor are they unique in the ability to closely bond with humans. They just happened to have a lucky break when the West was figuring out what animals were morally acceptable as food.

The Change.org petition gives five reasons to halt the “barbaric” festival: to prevent the spread of disease, to discourage theft of companion dogs, to reduce food safety hazards, to protect young people from witnessing violence (slaughter in the streets), and to eliminate “outdated” cultural practices that jeopardize China’s reputation.

Some of these are good points. Some of them aren’t.

Saving young people from seeing animals slaughtered for food is a stretch. In the days before factory farming, slaughter was part of everyday life. And eating dogs isn’t outdated yet, if people are still doing it. If it’s a global consensus that’s needed, there would need to be a lot more than 1.5 million signatures on that petition.

But petitioners are right that safety is important. Pre-slaughter conditions should be improved. Disease should be kept in check. But that goes for all cultures and all farmed species. Instead of calling for an end to the festival, a better choice would be to request safety regulation.

Dog theft is a valid concern. Since dogs aren’t farmed in the region, they have to come from somewhere. If butchers want to market dog meat, they should get said meat from a safe source. At a farm, quality control and veterinary regulation would be much easier. Ending the festival would just make safety standards more difficult to enforce. Right now, Yulin’s government has an opportunity to create a regulatory system, as the festival brings all of the products, suppliers, and consumers into one space. It’s great for business and logistics.

Using government force to extinguish something that makes some people uncomfortable isn’t sustainable. It’s like sex. It’s more effective to encourage people to practice safely rather than not at all. Westerners have benevolently snuffed out enough traditions from other cultures already. If a cultural custom is going to be killed, let the people who practice it deliver the final blow. And while numerous Chinese volunteers are driving the campaign, Duo Duo Animal Welfare Project’s strongest support appears to be Western.

Eradicating the custom is a possibility in this case. Chinese reports show that more and more citizens think of dogs as companion animals and not food animals. If there ceases to be a demand, dog meat will go away on its own, without needing Ricky Gervais to tweet about it. In the end, it’s Yulin’s issue to solve, not that of internet animal activists.