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Our outrage over China's Yulin dog meat festival exposes a disgusting hypocrisy

3K views 34 replies 12 participants last post by  Joan Kennedy 
#1 ·
Two simultaneous celebrations took place in recent weeks during which millions of animals were grilled, slathered in sauce and served with alcohol. The animals had been packed into trucks and transported - often over hundreds of miles - to slaughterhouses. They arrived weak, dehydrated and coated in urine and feces. Many endured brutal beatings and other abuses before their deaths. During the slaughter process, some of the animals were scalded and dismembered while still alive and fully conscious.

One celebration commemorated the summer solstice; the other fêted fathers. One was observed in the Chinese city of Yulin; the other took place in every city in America. On the menu in Yulin were 10,000 dogs and cats served with lychees and liquor. In America: millions of pigs, cows and chickens served with fixin's and beer.

Only one of these celebrations generated an international outcry, local and global protests, and a record-breaking 4 million signatures on a Change.org petition from people calling for the animals to be spared. Why?
Read the rest here: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/runkle-disgusting-hypocrisy-eating-animals-article-1.2275120

This article sums up a lot of the frustration I've been feeling with this issue for the past few weeks.
 
#2 ·
Some people don't care about animals at all. I think people who are trying to break up this event are further along than that. Most people seem to regard animals in terms of what the animals can provide for them: a distraction from loneliness and boredom in the case of companion animals, something to eat in the case of livestock. Either way, it's all about what the human wants. That's not very highly evolved, but it's pretty consistent.

For decades after World War II, people looked the other way about where the pet shops got the puppies they were selling. They also looked the other way at how many were being killed at shelters. These days the push to adopt instead of buy is reaching further than ever into more people's thinking. I believe the impulse to protect companion animals from slaughter is coming from a good place, but that your frustration is coming from taking it past impulse: from thinking it all the way through. That's a very good thing, but I'm leery about calling people hypocritical when they're responding to that thousands-of-years-old emotional bond dogs forged with us. The impulse is to view the slaughter of dogs for food as a monumental betrayal of trust, and I get that. When I stopped eating meat, it was weeks after the death of my 14-year-old Labrador. I was literally responding to an environmentalist's lecture about why it's helpful to cut back on beef, but at the same time meat just started to seem mean and creepy instead of normal. In a weird way I think that surge of thought-past-impulse was my dog's final gift to me.
 
#4 · (Edited)
I am adamantly against speciesism, and I don't think one animal is ever "better" than another when it comes to being neglected, abused, tortured, slaughtered and/or eaten. To place one species above another is hypocritical and speciesist. Just because the hypocrite perceives their view to be "right" doesn't mean it is. Even if they are incapable of differentiating between hypocrisy and logic, it STILL doesn't make their view acceptable. I have a far better understanding of a person who would eat a cow and a dog (clearly, they just don't care about animals at all and view them strictly as food) than one who would eat a cow but would not eat a dog (WTF is their logic?).
 
#7 · (Edited)
You are married to an omnivore, right? Is he willing to eat dogs?

ETA: I'm not trying to pick on you - I just have a difficult time reconciling this post with living happily with an omnivore.

On a broader basis, I'd ask everyone who thinks that the upset over the dog meat festival is hypocritical whether they would feel differently about going out to eat with someone who orders dog meat, or would there be no difference to you in watching someone eating dog rather than cow/chicken/fish?
 
#5 ·
Selective compassion doesn’t make you a hypocrite. It makes you a potential vegetarian and a potential vegan. Unless someone fouls up royally by calling you a hypocrite, which makes vegetarians and vegans look like a club you wouldn’t want to be part of.

Selective compassion is why people are more likely to donate an organ to a close relative than to a stranger, and why they give more money to domestic charities than to foreign ones. The animals you know, the people you can identify with, will always have the strongest lines to your heart. I think it’s admirable to extend that compassion to all of humanity and to the whole animal world, but I don’t think it’s admirable to call people names whose compassion is more for the kinds of animals that love them back.
 
#8 · (Edited)
Selective compassion doesn't make you a hypocrite. It makes you a potential vegetarian and a potential vegan. Unless someone fouls up royally by calling you a hypocrite, which makes vegetarians and vegans look like a club you wouldn't want to be part of.

Selective compassion is why people are more likely to donate an organ to a close relative than to a stranger, and why they give more money to domestic charities than to foreign ones. The animals you know, the people you can identify with, will always have the strongest lines to your heart. I think it's admirable to extend that compassion to all of humanity and to the whole animal world, but I don't think it's admirable to call people names whose compassion is more for the kinds of animals that love them back.
Although I agree to a certain extent, Saying that rude vegans and vegs are the reason other people don't turn out the same is a bad excuse.
It's the same argument to say because some feminists hate all men I shun feminism as a movement.

In anycase, I donating a organ is a huge burden on yourself and your health. So obviously most would be inclined to give a organ only to a very special person. Donating to local charities vs. far away ones is probably a better example.

Even then there's a very wide difference in hating Chinese people for eating dogs and happily eating pigs in America who are treated the same way. You have to admit that it's a little ridiculous.
 
#6 · (Edited)
I have yet to meet anyone who isn't a speciesist, if you define speciesism as giving some species preference over others.*

For example, I wholeheartedly give dogs, cats and birds preference over fleas, ticks, mites and parasitic worms, all of which I try to eradicate in my home and in the vicinity of my animals.

*That's not actually the way the term is used in AR discussions. This explains what is meant by speciesism: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/rights/speciesism.shtml
 
#9 ·
Rasitha, hypocritical and ridiculous are not interchangeable terms. I am objecting to the accusation that selectively compassionate animal lovers are being hypocritical. It's a highly loaded term in our culture, and shouldn't be thrown around lightly. Even Jesus had quite the load of contempt for hypocrites. But the term should really be reserved for those liars who preach one thing and do another: the pro-life politician who coerces his mistress into an abortion, for example. It shouldn't be used to describe the beliefs and behaviors of a person just because you disagree with them. And yes, if you call someone a hypocrite for loving dogs but not pigs, that is absolutely guaranteed to make the person think poorly of vegans and vegetarians.
 
#10 · (Edited)
I don't use the h-word. It's so overused as to be useless. The closest I get is 'inconsistant'. That generally gets the point across without sounding like a knee-jerk moral judgment.

Very often where one person sees hypocrisy the other person feels they are being perfectly consistent given their frame of reference - the way they categorize the beings around them.
 
#13 ·
It is absolutely hypocritical to claim to be against violence toward animals while directly participating in violence toward animals. If the individual in question only claims to be against violence toward dogs, then there's no hypocrisy inherent in that statement-- although it is logically inconsistent, since pigs display the same characteristics which make us sympathetic to dogs (intelligence, loyalty, affection, etc.)

I don't buy the idea that omnivores keep eating meat because of negative interactions they've had with vegans. Omnivores keep eating meat because their interest in eating meat is more important than their interest in animal welfare. It's acceptable for a vegan to engage in conversation with an omnivore and to use that opportunity to point out the logical inconsistencies in his or her thinking-- and it's often effective, too. Are you familiar with the popular comic Vegan Sidekick? Highlighting inconsistencies in omnivore logic is pretty much all he does, and he's inspired countless discussions and many converts. Some people react defensively, but some are open to conversation.
 
#14 ·
If a Mormon calls me a hypocrite in a religious discussion it will result in lowering my opinion of Mormons, especially of that one. If a Mormon says I'm being inconsistent in a religious discussion I will consider his point on its merits. Same with an open carry advocate in a discussion of gun rights. I don't agree that a person is an idiot for tagging a group for the bad manners of one of its members, or that the poor opinion is set in stone. I'm saying it brings a bit of nastiness into the mix that other more temperate members of the same group will need to make up for, if my opinion of the group is going to improve.
 
#15 ·
Its simple, human beings are selfish, over-manipulative, illogically self-logical beings. Suppose I call human-kind as b*stards I'm sure more than a couple of them will jump at my throat, this is how people are wired.. to protect their rear-ends by some delusional grandiose image of superiority over all creatures on earth. Yes I'm talking of the majority, not all. Mankind is a living testament of 'Lucifer', twisted minds born of this earth only to push, break and shatter every known golden rule of nature.

As his legacy mankind will only leave destruction & bloodshed on this earth, a few of us trying to patch up the sins of billions of people wont result in anything. I avoided coming to this thread fearing I'll lose control and now I have. Any country that simply doesn't spare any species of animals from becoming food like China must be nuked, and after the radiation singes every skin and eyeballs of the population there, it must be nuked again, and again and again and again.

There's a thin line between political-correctness and being true, I know I'm being true.
 
#19 ·
Any country that simply doesn't spare any species of animals from becoming food like China must be nuked, and after the radiation singes every skin and eyeballs of the population there, it must be nuked again, and again and again and again.
I hope you're not serious in suggesting that innocent people should die because their country hosts a dog meat festival. That's a horrible thing to say.

And to address no whey jose's point, that it's hypocritical to say you're against violence to animals while directly participating in violence against animals. At what point does direct participation become indirect participation? When the violence is against biting insects? When it's against the animals your dog or cat eats out of a can? Are we all really expected to draw our lines in exactly the same place, as far as who we should be calling out as hypocrites?
We're probably all guilty of varying degrees of hypocrisy, which is why I try never to use blanket statements such as "I am against violence toward animals" without clarifying exactly what kinds of violence I'm against. I take every opportunity to state that I oppose the unnecessary and intentional torture and slaughter of sentient creatures and that I intend to reduce my participation in such activities as much as can reasonably be expected.

That said, we draw the line where it is reasonable. Claiming to oppose the torture and death of an animal while taking pleasure in eating the corpse of an animal of similar characteristics isn't analogous to making the same claim while using medicated shampoo to remove lice from your daughter's hair. These are two wildly different scenarios with significantly different motivations.

When you say you believe someone is making a mistake you aren't giving the same poke in the eye as when you say you think they are lying. "Inconsistent" implies error. "Hypocritical" implies dishonesty. One is taken as a personal attack, and the other one isn't. Debate coaches always tell their debaters to attack the point, not the speaker, and I think that applies to this issue.
For the record, I'm not suggesting that the use of the word "hypocrite" in debate is the best choice. I prefer "cognitive dissonance" or "logical inconsistency." I'm merely arguing that it is, in fact, a form of hypocrisy whether we name it or not. I also don't personally attribute any harsh connotations to the word, as I consider myself an occasional hypocrite and will openly admit to that. I very much identify with this quote from comedian Louis C.K.:

"I have a lot of beliefs and I live by none of 'em. That's just the way I am. They're just my beliefs. I just like believing them. I like that part. They're my little believies. They make me feel good about who I am. But if they get in the way of a thing I want-- well, I ****in' do that!"

Isn't that true of all of us in at least some parts of our lives? It was certainly true for me in the many years between going vegetarian and going vegan. I considered myself an animal rights advocate and I knew in my gut that I didn't want to support the dairy and egg industry, but caring about that would get in the way of the ice cream I wanted, so I ate the ice cream. That was hypocritical of me. I still do stuff like that sometimes. I bought a pair of trainers the other day that were probably made in a sweatshop somewhere, even though I consider myself a human rights advocate who opposes slave wages and poor work conditions. I'm a hypocrite. I'm not proud, but I'm honest.

Again, I wonder how those with omnivore partners, friends and/or family members reconcile the charge of hypocrisy with willingly living with and/or socializing with these hypocrites. I can't imagine anything more soul destroying than living with someone and/or depending on the friendship of people one despises so much.
I still don't understand how hypocrite equates to "despised person." Perhaps our definition of the word is different. I recognise the hypocrisy in my friends and family the same as I do in myself, and I try to help them live their lives in a way that more accurately aligns with their stated moral beliefs.

Also, I'd still like to hear from those who don't refuse totally to ever eat a meal in the presence of someone eating flesh. Would you sit down and eat a meal with someone who is eating dog?
Yes, and I'd be as repulsed as I am when my partner eats anchovy and tuna pizza-- which is quite repulsed. I'm not precious about dogs, though.

If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it, but I think it is a perfectly normal human reaction to have a different reaction to a species as a whole if one has had a deep emotional attachment to one or more members of that species.
That's not hypocritical unless you claim to feel otherwise. If you say that the suffering of all animals affects you equally and then only cry when you see dog meat, you're being hypocritical. If you openly admit to a preference, you're being honest. If you claim that the suffering of all animals affects you at all, and then you EAT an animal (of any sort) for no particular reason aside from taste or convenience, you would be a hypocrite in that instance.
 
#17 · (Edited)
The international outcry over the dog meat festival: Do we even know that the leadership, the people spearheading these protests, are all meat eaters? I'd be surprised to learn that was the case. In my experience, a large number of people active in dog maltreatment activism are vegetarians or vegans.

And to address no whey jose's point, that it's hypocritical to say you're against violence to animals while directly participating in violence against animals. At what point does direct participation become indirect participation? When the violence is against biting insects? When it's against the animals your dog or cat eats out of a can? Are we all really expected to draw our lines in exactly the same place, as far as who we should be calling out as hypocrites?

When you say you believe someone is making a mistake you aren't giving the same poke in the eye as when you say you think they are lying. "Inconsistent" implies error. "Hypocritical" implies dishonesty. One is taken as a personal attack, and the other one isn't. Debate coaches always tell their debaters to attack the point, not the speaker, and I think that applies to this issue.
 
#21 · (Edited)
no whey jose: OK, I think I see our problem here. If I have you right, you think hypocrisy describes the gap between our beliefs and our behaviors. I think hypocrisy describes the gap between what we advocate others do and what we ourselves do. So you think you are being hypocritical when you kill lice while advocating mercy and justice for animals in general. I think you would be hypocritical only if you advocated other people leave the lice alone, or that they find a humane way to get them out of their hair without harming them, while privately, secretly, using a lice-killing shampoo on the ones in your own hair. I think it mitigates the insult if the person you're talking to knows you think everyone shares the vice to some extent. But it's also still an insult. If someone said to me "We're both fat, but you're way fatter than I am," I'd want to smack them down hard. More to the point, I think back to the debates on VB about whether it's selfish for people to follow a vegan diet for their health. People who defended calling it selfish said things like "We're all selfish to some extent." And of course I argued that it is an insult, giving offense for no good reason to people who are doing a good thing. Same thing here; I think the people drawing attention to this dog eating festival are doing a good thing, and they don't need to be taken down by people who think they're not doing enough. Especially when we don't even know what else they are or are not doing for animals.
 
#23 ·
It's really really difficult to be calm and kind in the face of passive cruelty. If we show just the slightest bit of upset, no one will want to "deal" with us. It's a very unfair world and we have to work twice as hard to live in it peacefully. But I kind of feel like if we don't play by "their rules" we wont be able to make progress. In any instance there is oppression and suffering, those sufferers are expected to be on their "best behavior" for others to "see their side" or they'll be labeled as radicals. And it SUCKS. But it doesn't seem like anything else is effective at getting through to others? :/

I dunno, reading this thread I'm just reminded on how we have to "walk on eggshells" just to try and get people to be pleasant with us. It's so unfair. But it's an unfair world... I guess.
 
#24 ·
It's really really difficult to be calm and kind in the face of passive cruelty. If we show just the slightest bit of upset, no one will want to "deal" with us. It's a very unfair world and we have to work twice as hard to live in it peacefully. But I kind of feel like if we don't play by "their rules" we wont be able to make progress. In any instance there is oppression and suffering, those sufferers are expected to be on their "best behavior" for others to "see their side" or they'll be labeled as radicals. And it SUCKS. But it doesn't seem like anything else is effective at getting through to others? :/
That's because the human legal system exists not to make everyone perfect, but to cover up the imperfections of people. It carefully illegalizes what the majority of the population do not indulge in, while legalizing illegal things where revenue opportunity exists. Man has made a lot of illogical checks & balances to ensure his protection & survival. Those who take the middle stance are always those who get the most praises, but really, what will ever come out of liberals calling both wrong-doers and radical defenders as wrong? Radicalism itself is a dreaded word today thanks to religion. Governments are nothing but control-radicalists who will do anything for taxes. In the end everybody knows that total peace is the only way out, this simple movement will unite religions, create gender equality, give animals breathing space on this earth and stop crimes of all sorts.

Will it happen? Nope, man is greedy.. he will always use every edge to gain superiority on earth. Its almost like an obsession to put every living organism here on earth to slavery, trees for wood, plants for food, animals for meat and different sections of financially weak human beings for different sections of slavery. Effectively this is what is happening today in the name of democracy.
 
#29 ·
As Joan said earlier, I think a lot of what has been going on in this thread is that we're assigning different meanings to terms. I define "hypocrite" the same way Joan does, and subsequently to me, it is one of the worst traits a person can have. Inconsistency in one's thinking, OTOH, is so prevalent that if it were one of the seven deadly sins, almost all of us would be headed straight to hell.

As to speciesism, as Rasitha pointed out and as the link I cited earlier describes, is not a matter of favoring one animal species over another; it's assuming that humans, by virtue of being human, have greater rights than other species. From the link I cited above:

What is speciesism?

'Speciesism' is the idea that being human is a good enough reason for human animals to have greater moral rights than non-human animals.

...a prejudice or bias in favour of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species.
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 1975
 
#31 ·
For the record, the actual definition of "hypocrisy" is:

hypocrisy

h??p?kr?si/

noun

the practice of claiming to have higher standards or more noble beliefs than is the case.
Yes. The implied dishonesty comes across even stronger here:
hy?poc?ri?sy
h??p?kr?s?/
noun
the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform; pretense.
synonyms: dissimulation, false virtue, cant, posturing, affectation, speciousness, empty talk, insincerity, falseness, deceit, dishonesty, mendacity, pretense, duplicity; sanctimoniousness, sanctimony, pietism, piousness; informalphoniness, fraud
"must politics be the perennial benchmark of hypocrisy?"
 
#32 · (Edited)
Until now with this one protest, I've never heard anyone in the AR community name-calling people for responding emotionally to news about a species being mistreated: whether they're upset by stories about brood bltches in puppy mills, or whales, or mink, or dolphins in "The Cove," or chimpanzees in laboratories. All these protests, like this Yulin dog slaughter protest, are working to engage everyone, including omnivores. In what way is this one group (not just the organizers, but those signing the petitions) exhibiting "disgusting hypocrisy" while the other groups are to be encouraged? Is nobody supposed to protest anything unless every protest is about every single animal being harmed by humans? If someone in Greenpeace is more strongly moved about whales than about livestock, and puts his energy where his heart lies, do we need to be jumping down his throat about that too?
 
#34 ·
The thing the definition no whey jose mentions misses is the intent of the speaker. That is the definition all the dictionaries I've seen use, but it doesn't address the issue of why we sometimes prefer to label others as 'hypocrites' rather than spelling it out as '[you're] claiming to have higher standards or more noble beliefs than is the case' or using a word like 'inconsistent'.

'Hypocrite' just has more punch to it, for the reasons Joan talked about. It's used as a pejorative. The alternatives seem inadequate precisely because the h-word isn't used solely for its semantics, but also to elevate ones own argument by denigrating the other. This isn't always a bad thing to do. To rally the troops against an enemy we have to define the enemy after all. If our ultimate goal is to have that enemy join us we should at least be honest about why and how we're saying what we say.
 
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#35 · (Edited)
It's also not hypocritical or inconsistent to be highly upset by something you're just now finding out about. People learn when they're small children that pork comes from pigs, beef comes from cattle and chicken comes from chickens. They've had their whole lives to process that information and sit with it in whatever way they're going to. That's typically a chronic irritant in the back of a person's (or culture's) mind, whereas finding out about a mass dogmeat festival is more of a sudden assault on the senses. That's like the difference between a backache you've been living with for years, versus a hard punch to the jaw. We're wired to react differently to our chronic vs acute conditions. Chronic feels familiar, something we adapt to over time, while acute feels like a dire threat demanding immediate response. The more I think about this, the more I think it's unfair and unhelpful for the article writer to seize on public reaction as evidence the public is all messed up. I think people are just doing what people are wired to do. If someone hopes to influence people's actions that person should work with, not against, the way people will naturally react and respond to upsetting information.
 
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