This Vice headline sums the Amazon situation up with the kind of bluntness that’s needed at the moment: “Sad About the Amazon Fires? Stop Eating Meat.” The article is a timely correction to the assumption that logging is the reason we are losing the Amazon rainforests. Many posting on social media accounts about the Amazon fires are unthinkingly connecting the damage to “other people”: greedy logging companies etc., when in fact the trail leads directly back to the people posting – many of whom eat meat. Cattle ranching is the leading cause of deforestation in the Amazon, and clearing lands to make way for cattle is what is causing the fires.

The growing demand for meat is driving this destruction, in particular the demand for beef. With plenty of healthy protein substitutes available, the slaughter of cattle is completely unnecessary. Industrial farming harms the environment in other ways through water pollution from slaughterhouses. Animal suffering is an inevitable byproduct of treating animals like products, to be mutilated and packaged. In the tragedy of the Amazon rainforest we can see how this approach to life has outward ripples. When we treat life like an industrial product, when we kill animals brutally, we lack the respect for other life that is ultimately needed to save our own lives and habitats.

Read More:
https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/bjwzk4/feeling-sad-about-the-amazon-fires-stop-eating-meat

If ever there was an obvious target for animal rights activists, the Yulin Dog Festival is it. The festival is a display of barbaric cruelty, with dogs and cats kept in cages (some stolen pets), and tortured to “improve” the taste of the meat. This is a cause that has drawn an immense level of public outcry, especially in the West. These voices (including the late Carrie Fisher and Ricky Gervais) are strident in criticizing the festival for its pure cruelty and senselessness. Of course, this criticism is right: boiling and skinning live animals is intensely cruel and violent. Still, Western critics in particular give local supporters of the festival a rallying cry by being “concerned” members of a public that happily kills and eats other kinds of animals. The shock value of the festival to Westerners can be disingenuous – when the shock of the festival lies in the type of animals that are killed – cats and dogs, rather than that they are barbarically killed. The fact that some of these animals are stray pets is an awful tragedy. But activism against animal cruelty needs to rest on more than disapproval of killing cats and dogs. It needs to stop inhumane killing, find an alternative to cultural practices that glorify bloodshed, and ultimately, end the widespread practice of eating meat. Eating a “bloody steak” or burger exists on the same spectrum that the Yulin Dog Festival does – a totally artificial belief that violence somehow makes our food more life-giving. Locals feel offended that Westerners fail to understand how the poverty of the region apparently contributes to the dogmeat industry.

Without making excuses for the festival, it might be possible to use it as a rallying point to do more in your animal rights activism. If you protest the festival because of the killing of family pets, but eat meat, consider that all life is precious and think about reducing or cutting out your meat consumption. If you protest the festival and have no interest in supporting human or workers’ rights in your home country or abroad, consider whether you are contributing to a problem where violent and impoverished lives form people capable of doing violence to animals. If violence can teach us anything it is that all life is connected. The chain in which people do violence to each other and animals can also become a chain of understanding, care and support if actions are taken that are mindful, peaceful and connected.

To protest the Yulin Dog Festival, read, share and sign the petition – and commit to a non-violent lifestyle!

Further Reading:

https://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/968244/yulin-dog-meat-festival-Peter-Li-days-numbered
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/yulin-dog-meat-festival-china-animal-rights-chinese-culture-western-interference-a7800416.html