Please read this article about Thanksgiving, by co-founder of Farm Sanctuary, Gene Baur:

Dark, filthy warehouses that reek of excrement. Masses of animals in distress. Mutilated beaks and toes. Sick, injured birds left to suffer and die without anyone to help them. These are not the kinds of images we tend to think about at Thanksgiving, yet they are indicative of the reality faced by more than 46 million turkeys raised every year in the U.S. for this holiday alone.

READ THE REST HERE

These are puppies who were rescued by a Chinese friend yesterday from a roadside in Beijing:

And this is a racist magazine cover story by a Swiss magazine “City Weekend – Beijing” telling its expat readers that now is “the perfect time” to eat dog meat, and also strongly implies that only “Westerners” abhor the idea of eating dog meat.

The Swiss-owned magazine “City Weekend” (Oct 28 edition)  says it’s the “perfect time” to eat dogs – before such a thing is outlawed – and tells us that “Westerners” abhor the of idea of eating dogs, implying that Chinese people don’t.

Next time City Weekend decides to promote a rush to eat dog meat before it’s outlawed, I strongly suggest they first visit a dog meat farm first and then decide whether they want to promote it and associate their “Western”-owned brand with this particular form of animal exploitation.

With so few species of nonhuman animals protected from our brutality, you would think rich media companies like Ringier and their magazine City Weekend would give “man’s best friend” a break.

ADDENDUM:

A letter I just sent Ringier:

Dear Ringier and City Weekend,

Please see my short post on Vegan Social Club about your magazine City Weekend’s promotion of the dog meat industry.

Your magazine’s continued promotion of animal exploitation in China and your writers’ tongue-in-cheek partaking in forms of animal exploitation like eating dog meat — as if it were a form of tourism — is reprehensible.

But even if you care nothing about the fear and terror of dogs facing their end in dog meat farms, surely your company gives a crap about racism, which your writer promotes in the very same article.

A Swiss magazine sends its staff to eat dog meat, then writes about how tasty it was, encourages other expats to try it before it’s outlawed (clearly indicating your writers’ and editors’ awareness that Chinese society frowns on the practice so much, it has been trying to outlaw it), but makes the case that most “Westerners” somehow abhor this more than most Chinese do.

• The people paying for the dog meat in this story are Swiss-owned magazine workers, not the masses of dog-loving Chinese citizenry.
• The people who surely laughed their way through the whole experience work for a foreign magazine, generally managed by Brits or Americans, not Chinese people.
• The people who published the address and telephone number of the dog meat restaurant in this story are YOUR writers and editors, not Chinese people.
• The people encouraging readers to hurry up and do something soon-to-be-outlawed are YOUR writers and editors, not Chinese people.

As a media owner (with distribution rights, a large readership, permission to publish, etc) CITY WEEKEND is a member of this community. And in this case:

• you are the dog-meat eaters in Beijing.
• And while no dog meat-eater walks around with a billboard encouraging others to eat dogs too, this is exactly what you are doing, with your tens of thousands of magazine copies.
• You are the people who have betrayed these animals, bred by fickle, hypocritical humanity as “sometimes friend, sometimes food.”
• The dogs whose lives were wasted, spent meaninglessly in cages and then ended brutally without any “euthanasia” or painless killing techniques, were eaten BY YOUR STAFF on YOUR BUDGET.

So, how dare City Weekend talk about what China or Chinese people do?!

Look at the puppies in my post. These were rescued by ordinary Chinese people, not expat writer-tourists from the US or Europe. They weren’t rescued by you. Your company didn’t do shit for them.

There are many things not yet outlawed in China. Shall City Weekend to a cover story on all the things that aren’t yet legally proscribed yet, but which break the hearts of millions of people everyday?

What your company did do is encourage yet more idiots in the expat community to eat “weird food”, destroy more species of animals, encourage a “food-as-fun” mentality that spells disaster and cruelty for billions of life forms on our planet.

Chris Barden
Beijing, China

更新：戈多被领养了！而且是一位非常有爱心，非常细心的人。有了她照顾戈多，我们都非常高兴。无论如何，戈多不会再流浪。

我是个8岁左右的公狗，流浪了很长时间，两周以前一个心眼很软的美国人跟我说，“我愿意帮你，

也代表人类向你赔礼道歉。走吧，去医院。”

后来，更多人（包括大夫）伸出手帮我。我刚刚做肿瘤切除手术（成功了），身体很虚弱，但是我还想活下去，我还不想离开这个地球。现在，需要能够给我临时寄养的地方的人，我不是特别麻烦，但是还在恢复健康的时间，需要你有耐心。

我的美国朋友会负责我的未来，但是他家很小，有很多猫，所以需要能够提供一个过度的地方的

人帮忙。我不需要任何人怜悯我，只需要你把我当朋友，给我一点点尊严和温暖就可以了。

These little guys will be available for adoption soon. They were beneficiaries of an effort (still underway) to relocate 16 stray dogs who were rescued by local heroine Auntie Xu. Will have information soon about the other dogs. IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN ADOPTING or FOSTERING Furball or Panda, please contact us via our contact page.

Time: 7pm Thursday  October 7th
时间： | 10月 7号，周四，19:00

Place: Jingsi Vegetarian Restaurant, Yuqun Hutong (see Map Below)
地点：静思素食坊（美术馆分店）

Getting There: Jingsi is about 15 mins walk from either Zhangzizhong or Dongsi Subway Station. If you have any questions, or have any problems finding it, call Kristen on 134 6676 4660 or Jingsi on 6400 8941.

Please RSVP by email if you plan on coming so that we can have an idea of numbers.

如果你确定能来， 请通过email通知我们 为了我们可以预约足够的座位。

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Former President Bill Clinton has adopted a plant-based diet in order to stop and possibly reverse the damage to this body done by a lifetime of eating anything-but-vegan. Make what you will of his motives — surely, he’s not giving up meat and dairy because he feels bad about the suffering of farm animals — but it’s a pretty strong advertisement for a growing acceptance by very mainstream health experts on the advantages of an undeniably win-win diet, and I’m thinking that future Grandpa Clinton might some day see and talk more about the ethical dimensions about a plant-based lifestyle.

RELATED

• Chelsea’s Big Fat Vegan Wedding
• President Clinton Exploring a Plant-Based Diet

Time: 7pm Thursday 2nd September
时间： | 9月 2号，周四，19:00

Place: Jingsi Vegetarian Restaurant, Yuqun Hutong (see Map Below)
地点：静思素食坊（美术馆分店）

Getting There: Jingsi is about 15 mins walk from either Zhangzizhong or Dongsi Subway Station. If you have any questions, or have any problems finding it, call Kristen on 134 6676 4660 or Jingsi on 6400 8941.

Please RSVP by email if you plan on coming so that we can have an idea of numbers.

如果你确定能来， 请通过email通知我们 为了我们可以预约足够的座位。

View Larger Map