Critics bark about dog-eating festival's health risks

While an old ethical debate has intensified over an upcoming annual dog-eating festival in south China, experts are more concerned about risks in gobbling animals with dubious quarantine records.

As in previous years, the event, slated for June 21 to mark the summer solstice in Yulin City in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, has drawn mounting protests from animal welfare groups and pet owners, who urge the local government to ban the long-standing tradition.

On the day, Yulin residents will eat dog meat alongside lychees. Activists say that about 10,000 dogs will be consumed on the occasion.

Despite the longstanding and fierce opposition to the event, the Yulin government has insisted that it will not step in because China does not outlaw dog-eating and the event is a folk custom.

However, this year, the government has suggested local restaurants serving dog dishes cover the character "dog" on their signboards during the festival to avoid exasperating opponents.

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Earlier this month, seven Chinese experts in the fields of veterinary medicine, law and animal welfare sent a letter to the chairman of the regional government to plead for an end to the festival.

They wrote that mass consumption of dog meat on a single day increases the risk of rabies, since long-distance transport of live dogs is a cause of the fatal disease.

The Yulin government has long denied its involvement in organizing the event. But considering the dog-eating spree's potential link to a rabies outbreak, the letter said, it should not turn a blind eye to the practice.

China is second only to India in the number of human infections with rabies worldwide every year. Guangxi sees the most infections among all domestic municipalities, provinces and autonomous regions.

"Transporting and butchering so many dogs, if they haven't had the rabies vaccine, will pose a certain risk to those who do the job," said the letter.

Also, the experts pointed to food safety concerns due to unclear sourcing of the dogs. Citing their own investigations, animal welfare groups claim that most of the dogs consumed during the event are strays, pets as well as dogs stolen or poisoned, in Yulin or from other parts of the country.

Such allegations seem to have been backed up by a spate of dog thefts and poisonings reported across the country.

In the latest case, 11 people in Hubei Province were jailed in May for selling poisonous dog meat since the beginning of 2013. They killed about 1,000 dogs in the countryside with darts covered in toxic chemicals and sold the meat of about 10 of the animals before being caught in December.

The Yulin government, however, denies such risks. Chen Taotao, deputy head of the city's food and drug administration, said there have been no such dogs found by their inspections in local markets.

Wei Wanli, a worker with the city's aquatic products, animal husbandry and veterinarian bureau, said dogs sold in Yulin were mainly shipped from other places.

On highways leading to the city, authorities have been stopping trucks packed with live dogs to ask for the animals' quarantine certificates, without which the trucks are prohibited from entering the city, Wei said.

However, loopholes are obvious. Wei admitted that such checks are not in place on more minor roads and the authorities do not demand the certificate for each animal.

In addition, there is only light supervision of private butchers, who often move from one place to another and work at night, he said.

A regulation issued by the Ministry of Agriculture last April required that each dog receive laboratory tests for rabies, distemper and other diseases before being transported. The article, without specifying the penalty for a violation, has been poorly implemented.

The experts' letter pointed out that, if properly implemented, it would in effect ban mass transportation of dogs. The quarantine costs for hundreds of dogs in a truck would amount to at least 150,000 yuan (24,000 U.S. dollars), a fee nobody would be willing to pay.