It’s been called a PR catastrophe, an abhorrent food celebration and the scene of a massacre, but is the hoo-ha about Yuling dog meat festival warranted?

Every June, a small Chinese city celebrates the Summer Solstice, when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, with a 10-day long festival that is dogged by public outrage and surrounded in controversy.

Accusations of animal cruelty, exploitation and unethical treatment are hurled at the locals in Yulin, south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, whose annual event has been slammed as gruesome, horrific and disrespectful of life.

Friday marks the end of the Lychee and Dog Meat Festival, muting extensive media coverage that has given the city a bad reputation, and silencing vexed voices of animal right advocates – at least until next year.

The Yulin festival has proven to be a bone of contention in a modern society that boasts about its environmental awareness, prides itself for valuing companion animals, adopts laws to protect them and incessantly works towards ensuring their well-being.

On the surface, the event pits dog lovers against dog meat lovers, with the former camp arguing that pooches are friends not food and the latter contending they are carrying on with a decades-old tradition. Since its inception in the late 2000s, the June celebration has led to heightened passions and bitter divides in China and abroad – marked at times by physical confrontation between activists and sellers – centering on the morality of eating dogs.

However, the debate over canine consumption seems to have failed in recognizing the inconsistencies in viewing the killing of animals and succeeded in isolating it from present-day consumptive practices of meat.

Society has long normalized meat consumption and turned it into a tool for socialization, with blood-dripping steaks served to impress a first date, turkeys taking center stage at Christmas dinners, big juicy burgers sold à gogo wherever whenever, shrimp cocktails adorning wedding tables, and Sunday outdoor barbecue bringing families together.

Humans have been desensitized to the suffering of animals by their carnivorous culinary cravings.

With pockets getting deeper, meat consumption has been democratized and the appetite for it has grown exponentially worldwide.

In 1963, global meat production stood at 78 million tons per year. Forty-eight years later, in 2011, the size had quadrupled to a whopping 308 million tons every year.

And the number just keeps swelling. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) predicts the production will climb to 455 million tons by 2050.

Meanwhile, the average adult consumed 34 kilograms of the “Big Four” – cows, chickens, pigs and sheep – in 2014 according to data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

By 2024, the number is projected to reach 35.5 kilograms per capita per year.

This intense lust for animal protein comes at the expense of the lives of the 19 billion chickens, 1.5 billion cows, one billion pigs and a similar number of sheep that exist on the planet at any given point of time to feed a hungry industry.

Every slice of pepperoni pizza, every bite of chicken nuggets and every strip of bacon have added to the mental dissociation between what is being served on the plate and what the food used to be.

“We see consumption as an end in itself, and we do not consider what have been the means to that end,” writes Amy J. Fitzgerald in her 2015 book “Animals as Food: (Re)connecting Production, Processing, Consumption, and Impacts”.

The slaughter of animals has been consistently overlooked for the sake of indulging in a square meaty meal, leading to widespread cultural conditioning towards killing animals – most of them at least.

Denial at dinner table seems to whet the appetite. We have learned to turn a blind eye on the atrocities animals are subjected to and the pain they go through to end up in the serving plate. Fizgerald argues that “as a culture we tend not to envision the animals whose bodies we dine” – we successfully separate the current condition of the dead and motionless meal from its past living state.

Our lack of emotional reaction to the death of animals unconsciously allows human to block thoughts of the agonizing industrial chain that has led our favorite food from the farm to the factory and eventually our table, and disregard the process that turns their bodies into consumable products.

“In our everyday lives, we use tons of linguistic illusions to shield ourselves from feeling a twinge of conscience at the animals being butchered in abattoirs tens of thousands of miles away from our neighborhoods. We have replaced calves with veal, cows with beef, pigs with pork, lambs with mutton (…) so that we are convinced by ourselves that what lie on our dining tables are just some pieces of meat rather than animals that were once as lively as we now are,” says Samson Tang, an anthropologist and specialist in Human-Animal Studies, in his article “Some we love, some we eat: Rethinking the Yulin Dog Meat Festival”.

The morally neutral stance entrenched in society towards butchering livestock for consumption is in stark contrast to the hostile attitudes humans adopt at the thought of harming dogs, let alone slicing them up in public.

Dogs have climbed the value chain to become “man’s best friend.” Their status has given them preferential treatment over the remaining species in the animal kingdom, illustrated in the schizophrenic attitude towards the consumption of their meat in comparison with that of cows, sheep, chickens and pigs.

Since their domestication some 15,000 years ago, dogs have entered humans’ households, and their hearts.

Their close interaction with us as companion animals has “humanized” them in our eyes. We give them names and treats, refer to them in gender-specific personal pronouns, forge intimate relations with them based on emotions and conversations, keep a close eye on their health and make sure their tails keep wagging in happiness.

Dogs are part of our families, they are one of “us”.

“This explains why there has been an international backlash against the Yulin Dog Meat Festival, for what was once a ‘them’ has already become an ‘us.’ It behooves us therefore to rescue ‘our own kind,’” notes Tang.

But the excessive interest dogs enjoy reveals the bias of our perceptions towards animals and exposes partisanship in our appreciation to sentient animals and their right to life.

According to studies, chickens exhibit empathy and show signs of anxiety when their offspring are in distress, cows develop friendships and become stressed if they are separated, pigs surpass three-year-old human children in cognition tests and are more trainable than dogs, while sheep can recall faces – be they human or other sheep – when looking at photographs.

The outrage against the Yulin festival is triggered, among other causes, by the mere idea of sacrificing dogs for human consumption (also found in South Korea, New Zealand and Switzerland) as well as the images of animals in anguish, crammed in wire cages as their friends are butchered and gutted before their eyes and bloody carcasses slung over a hook for everyone to see.

To condemn the festival using such argument per se seems unjustified, and simplifies a much more complex situation. 

While such scenes are undoubtedly heartbreaking and saddening, they are not exceptionally unique to Yulin, but hold uncanny resemblance to the brutality that is confined to the inners of slaughterhouses in every corner of the world where cows, pigs and other species face death in the ugliest of ways.

The discussion about what is happening in Yulin is undeniably one of crucial importance.

However, instead of focusing solely on making dog meat consumption a thing of the past, calls should concentrate on bringing attention to end demand against animals – all animals without exception – as well as promoting ethical eating habits, harmonious existence with other life forms and kinder decisions to kill hunger pangs.