Most Chinese want an end to the controversial "Yulin Dog Meat Festival", saying it has "harmed China's reputation", according to a poll out Friday.
About 64 percent of the survey group, aged 16 to 50, said they would support a permanent end to the infamous annual event.
It also showed 51.7 percent of the respondents - who included Yulin residents too - wanted the dog meat trade banned completely, while 69.5 percent claimed to have never eaten dog meat.
"The poll shows most people here don't eat dogs," said Qin Xiaona, director of the Capital Animal Welfare Association charity, one of a cluster of animal welfare groups that commissioned the survey.
Yulin, a small town in southwest China's Guangxi region, has become notorious in recent years for its "dog meat festival", a commercial event in which thousands of dogs and cats are slaughtered and eaten.
Local businesses launched the festival - arguing it was a tradition and part of the local culture - in 2009 to promote the remote area to tourists.
"It is embarrassing to us that the world wrongly believes that the brutally cruel Yulin festival is part of Chinese culture," said Qin.
"It isn't."
The campaign to end the festival was supported by people around the world who were disgusted at the cruelty involved in the butchering of the animals, she said.
An unprecedented 8 million Chinese voted online in support of lawmaker Zheng Xiaohe's legislative proposal during the National People's Congress in March to ban the illegal dog and cat meat trade.
Last week, a petition to ban the dog slaughter, signed by 11 million people from China and abroad, was presented to the Chinese embassy in London.
A draft law to prohibit and punish cruelty to animals was submitted to China's highest legislature in 2009.
Since then, Tenger, a renowned Inner Mongolia singer and political adviser, has been presenting his proposal to implement the law at the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference annual meeting.
His proposal has topped online opinion polls, backed by a growing number of Chinese animal lovers.
A 2015 survey showed an estimated 30 million urban households owned companion animals.
In China's fast expanding cities, senior citizens living alone are increasingly keeping dogs or cats to fend off loneliness.
Angella Zheng, of the International Foundation for Animal Welfare (IFAW), told Xinhua that, contrary to the erroneous impression outside China, most Chinese adore and protect animals.
Despite this, a black market in dog and cat meat, which is responsible for theft and slaughter of pets, is thriving, driven by greed and negligence of the risks, said Zheng.
THEFT AND LIES
"Before discussing whether to eat or not to eat dog, the more important question is: Where do the 10,000 dogs slaughtered daily in Yulin come from? Were they properly vaccinated in accordance with the law? Did the killing of the animals comply with hygiene standards?" asked Zheng.
Gao Guan, vice secretary-general of China Meat Association, told Xinhua that China has no industry breeding dogs for meat.
Liu Lang, head of the Beijing Association of Small Animal Veterinary Medicine, explained in a report that breeding cats or dogs for meat would be impossible due to feed and vaccination costs, which were much higher than for herbivorous livestock.
