Exclusive: Animal Defenders Say China Still Allowing Open Slaughter at Yulin Dog Meat Festival Despite Growing Public Disgust

This year’s Yulin Lychee and Dog Meat Festival – a harrowing display in Guangxi, China, in which vendors slaughter dogs openly for consumption on the street – appeared to attract significantly less interest that prior iterations, animal rights organizations told Breitbart News this week, though not due to any action to deter the event by Chinese authorities.

The Yulin festival begins every year on the Summer Solstice, June 21, and featured street butchers crowding the streets of the eponymous city with cages full of dogs and some cats, many of them believed to be stolen pets. The event annually results in the killing of thousands of dogs, whose meat consumers believe help handle the brutal Chinese summer heat (the lychees, a sweet, fleshy Asian fruit, is believed similarly beneficial in the summer). Animal rights activists have for years noted that eating dog meat is not a longstanding tradition in China and the Yulin festival itself is only about 15 years old, begun in 2010 as a way to increase dog meat sales.

The event rose to international recognition in the mid-2010s as a result of heightened celebrity interest in America. Household names such as Matt Damon, Paris Hilton, Ricky Gervais, and Joaquin Phoenix made public appears for the Chinese government to ban the event, and dog meat consumption generally, in 2015.

At home, China-based animal rights groups have defied the festival for years by rescuing and rehoming dogs that would have been eaten at Yulin. Much international attention to the event has evaporated, however, initially as a result of rumors that the festival had been canceled in 2017, later to a decline in interest by high-profile celebrity supporters of animal rights events.

International animal rights organizations have persisted in documenting and opposing the horror of Yulin, however, and reported a dramatic change in the festival from 2023 to 2024: the Chinese public appears increasingly uninterested in participating, even when the Chinese Communist Party does little to deter the event.

Wendy Higgins, Humane Society International’s (HSI) director of international media, told Breitbart News that “HSI’s Chinese activist contacts on the ground in Yulin tells us that while of course there are still distressing scenes of dog and cat death, the sale of dog carcasses and of live dogs at the two main markets of the Yulin ‘festival’ this year looked fairly slow.”

“Local activists who were there on the core solstice day on 21st June confirmed this,” Higgins noted. “That said, there was no evidence of local government direct action against the dog meat traders, no stalls being shut down as we’ve seen in previous years.”

HSI shared images of this year’s festival provided by Vshine, its official partner in China, showing cages full of dogs and bloody sidewalks as butchers conducted their slaughters in broad daylight, as usual, with no opposition from local Communist Party officials.

Warning – Graphic Photos:

In Defense of Animals, a global animal rights group, reported that its affiliates in China similarly documented signs that locals in Yulin were avoiding the event, in particular “the noticeable absence of new temporary dog meat stands, which usually pop up during the festival,” this year.

“Many of the older stands have also disappeared — a change Duo Duo Project [a Chinese animal rights group] attributes to the new Yulin Party Secretary, Wang Shen, who took office in June 2023,” In Defense of Animals observed.

The public’s lack of participation in the festival is a significant change from what animal rights activists documented in Yulin in 2023, which the British-based animal rights organization NoToDogMeat/World Protection For Dogs and Cats in the Meat Trade described as “bigger and crueler than ever.”

“Locally they are saying it was the biggest Yulin turnout in years. There were also western tourists in attendance which I found particularly distasteful,” an activist with the China-based animal rights group Paws of China, known then as Plush Bear’s Shelter, told Breitbart News last year.

Higgins, with HSI, told Breitbart News this year that Yulin is showing signs of visible changes in public attitudes towards dogs, independent of the government’s inaction.

“What is interesting to know is that in the last couple of years many pet hospitals, pet supply stores, and pet grooming businesses have opened up in Yulin,” Higgins said, “demonstrating that the dog and cat meat trade in Yulin exists in direct contradiction to a burgeoning companion animal-loving population.”

“That gives us hope that the anomaly of China’s dog meat trade will ultimately not survive even in so-called hotspots areas like Yulin,” she continued. “It was only a few years ago that the Chinese government confirmed that dogs are considered companion animals and not food animals. In that context, the dog meat trade is clearly not in line with Chinese societal norms.”

A senior official with the international animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), PETA Asia Senior Vice President Jason Baker, similarly told Breitbart News that popular sentiment in China is shifting away from interest in public dog slaughter.

“Most Chinese people don’t eat dog meat or support the Yulin festival, and it’s long past time for the Chinese government to ban killing dogs for food,” Baker said, “as South Korea recently did.”

The government of South Korea, a nation with a long history of dog consumption, banned the dog meat trade in January in the face of loud opposition from dog farmers whose livelihoods depended on dog slaughter. The ruling conservative party in South Korea, the People Power Party, deemed dog consumption essentially too unpopular internationally, threatening to damage a decade-long effort in “soft power” in which Seoul has used its popular music, television shows, and other culture to promote a positive public image around the world.

“The Yulin dog-eating festival should be a reminder of the cruelty and suffering that animals face when outdated traditions are allowed to continue,” Baker told Breitbart News, “but from poodles to pigs, all sentient beings feel pain and fear and don’t want to die in horrible ways—so anyone appalled by the idea of eating dogs is urged to extend their compassion to please go vegan.”

In China, interest in animal rights has grown to such an extent that Vshine, the HSI partner in China, successfully used the regime-controlled social media application WeChat to establish a tip hotline to report animal law violators in the country and has collaborated with authorities on some operations to shut down illegal dog meat operations.

Rights groups warn that any positive momentum in a given year does not necessarily lead to long-term eradication of systemic animal abuses without sustained pressure, noting the evaporating celebrity support for the cause against the Yulin festival following the wave of interest in 2015 and 2016. In 2017, rumors that China had canceled the festival – which proved to be false – all but silenced support against Yulin outside of the ongoing work of dedicated organizations.

“Yulin of course is just one location in China where the brutal dog and cat meat trade exists,” Higgins of HSI told Breitbart News.

“Yulin is supplied by slaughterhouses and dog and cat thieves and traffickers from across the country, and so if we want to tackle this brutal trade we need to look further afield than Yulin to look at the whole supply network.”

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