Vegan Social Club of Beijing

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.

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