The dog whistling in this New Yorker article on pandemic pets was really something.
If you want to see this post in video form, you can check out the latest video I posted on my Youtube channel:
So yes, eating dogs. A topic I don’t particularly really enjoy bringing up, but that I tend to get exposed to a lot anyway.
Both in my personal life - since I look Asian, some yokel will ask apropos of nothing if I’ve ever tasted dog before. And in my profession life - since I work for an organization that showcases China, you basically court it whenever you talk about dogs, like in the case of this Café where you can hang out with huskies we featured:
I've been deleting/reporting the worst comments. You'll see a collection of them later, don't you worry.
It’s annoying but expected. Then sometimes, the dog eating topic comes completely out of left field.
Like now. With this fantastically long, fantastically meandering feature published in the New Yorker late last month.
Authored by Nick Paumgarten, a writer there for 20 years, the title of the piece is an innocuous seeming “What Will Become of the Pandemic Pets – In times of stress and isolation, we turned to them for comfort. Now it’s time to think about what owning animals really means.”
For about half of its 6600 words, it talks about exactly that, going into the rise in vet visits during the pandemic, the trend of considering your pets your babies, and even a bit of a history as to why there are so few shelter pets available now in the USA – the system is both pretty decent at sterilization, and before that, euthanization. 7 million doggos euthanized in 1973. Phew!
I don’t hate on that part. It meanders a bit and contains the kind of typical navel gazey New Yorker feature writer bit of “this applies to me and my relationship with my XYZ,” but otherwise is setting good context for a good question: What’s America going to do about its home companions now that it’s no longer going to be working from home?
Oh, if only it was focused on that.
Because actually, that sensible meat of a story is for, whatever reason, sandwiched between the beginning and end that has almost nothing to do with any of that, except that it involves dogs.
The first 850+ words starts with a character study of a 56-year-old aggressively angry at being quarantined in a hotel while waiting for permission to leave, so he can rescue dogs from the infamous Yulin Meat Market and send them to the United States. It then paints his organization, called No Dogs Left Behind, as some sort of clever guerilla rebel with a cause operation, with his colleagues allegedly calling him The General and Dog Rambo Jesus.
That story is interrupted after a very suspect reminder that covid came from Wuhan in order to insert the piece that’s actually focused on Americans in America and their pet obsession… before we suddenly pivot back to the No Dogs Left Behind organization for the 2900 word end of the article.
So summarizing that whole bit, Dog Rescue Jesus got started in 2016, just five years ago, and now he’s allegedly rescued “tens of thousands of dogs, directly or indirectly” from a sad, disgusting fate.
Thanks to it being a global pandemic, and China being one of the most stringent countries when it comes to quarantining – something I experienced early on – Dog Rescue Jesus gets stuck for a while. America bans dogs coming from abroad due to a rabies scare, and suddenly the 95 dogs he managed to get pre-adopted can’t get to the USA.
...And how many dogs in America are pets that were rescued from the Yulin Meat Festival? Here’s a hint – it’s actually very negligible.
According to the ASPCA, Americans adopt 1.6 million dogs every year. Another 670,000 are euthanized.
Animals Asia estimated in 2017 that the Yulin Festival had shrunk to around 1000 dogs… so even if NDLB was rescuing all of them, that’s...
670x less dogs than if they’d concentrated on the poor buddies at home.
Okay, so before we truly deep dive into how all of this is problematic: there aren’t any outright lies in this article. The worst and most obvious fact check would come from conflating Wuhan and Yulin as somewhere similar to begin with. They’re actually 800 miles apart, in completely different provinces. It’d be like if you were reporting on people rescuing animals in New Mexico, and then conflated it with what folks are doing in Nebraska
Yes, the Yulin Dog Meat Festival exists and yes, China on a whole probably doesn’t view eating dogs with as much disgust as the United States. Yes, there are some very dedicated foreign volunteers here who work on dog rescue efforts – I know some of them. More on that later.
But let’s zoom out a bit to understand why, especially right now, the way this entire story is framed even beyond the fact that it’s incongruous to the actual story the title promises makes it… oh no… oh I didn’t mean to pun this. Racist dog whistling. I have a real bone to pick with the NYer. They’re really barking up the wrong tree with this one.
Because… even the stories having some basis in truth does not make them not a tired and extremely biased stereotype that is indicative of much larger problems on international reporting of China… and the current state of US China relations right now.
Reporters like to think they’re objective observers of the world, but what they choose to report on, and how they frame what they report on, is crucial to examine what they’re saying between the lines.
Now having been a reporter here in China myself for quite a while, I've been immersed in over a decade now of international writing about it.
I can't remember which journalist said this anymore - feel free to credit in comments if you do – but that someone brilliant once broke down most foreign reporting on China into the same three stories:
- China is big
- China is weird
- China is scary
Now ironically, by flattening China into all the same everywhere, and by focusing on such a small subject matter that doesn’t truly have any impressive superlatives behind it, Paumgarten has managed to make China – for once – seem a lot tinier than it actually is.
Hence a pandemic that originated in the Central-Eastern city of Wuhan, a city larger than two Chicagos, can be conflated with a dog festival in a town that borders Vietnam.
However, he does lean into the weird and scary parts… by highlighting what’s just not normal there.
I could pick apart nearly all of this, but that’ll take WAY too much time, so here are some highlights:
See how unspecific these “fun fact about this country” are?
This country doesn’t have dog meat farms, but some people in it eat dogs… It’s not technically illegal to sell dog meat. Pets aren’t spayed and neutered.
All true, but also true of the United States up until the mid-70s. In fact, the United States still doesn’t actually have a federal ban on dog eating – a bill was introduced just three years ago and… is like, literally doing nothing. Just sitting there.
But no, China is weird for not respecting animals like the civilized populace does!
Oh and by the way, that attempt to tie this back to Wuhan? No Wuhanite I know has admitted knowing that dog-meat soup wards off disease.
In any case, what a insidious framing right? Or am I being oversensitive? I don’t know, maybe I am.
Maybe you just become a little sensitive when you’re showing people as magical a place to hang out as this… and then for months afterwards, you are repeatedly flagging comments like this.
Especially since, in case you haven’t gotten the hint yet, construing the Yulin Dog Meat Festival as China’s relationship with dogs is like assuming you can describe an elephant from it’s butt wart.
Let’s start with the most glaringly missing part of this story:
You know who is actually going out there in droves rescuing dogs in droves from the Yulin Dog Meat Festival? CHINESE LOCALS.
Not foreign animal lovers, though obviously several do find their calling in helping pets here in China. Not the government, which Paumgarten does mention has made dog meat laws so restrictive that the market is drying up anyway,
…but actual local born-and-bred-in-China animal lovers who find the festival abhorrent and backwards because dog meat eating was already on steep decline in 2010, when the festival started.
And they have been since the beginning, rescuing trucks full of dogs, way before Mr. Dog Rambo Jesus came on the scene in 2016.
Here is an article from Global News in 2014 about how the festival had actually moved its date earlier in hopes of foiling activists that had been bothering it for YEARS.
And the Humane Society has published numerous articles about how the anti-dog meat movement is almost completely local.
Because pet ownership has skyrocketed here. Did you know that actually, the amount of dogs & cats owned as pets in China surpassed the USA in 2019? Last year, you know what was the top-selling product in the equivalent to China’s Black Friday/Cyber Monday? CAT FOOD.
Paumgarten cites that Millennials are obsessed with their little fur babies.
And cities with the most middle class residents, and therefore the most pets, have stepped up quickly to offer support. Shanghai piloted its first free clinic for pet spaying/neutering last year – you can book an appointment through a mobile app.
Granted, Shanghai’s not Yulin. But neither is Wuhan.
Paumgarten alludes to this by throwing in a random paragraph of another horrifying pet story about China:
First off, the only reason this is pandemic era is because America is still in the middle of the pandemic. In China, within the borders at least, everything is basically back to normal.
These “blind boxes” are a new ecommerce gimmick akin to getting gatcha prizes by delivery. China has been on an ecommerce gimmick kick since it surpassed brick-and-mortar commerce about 5 years ago. That’s why China has, probably, the most advanced ecommerce market in the world.
Some terrible people thought that live pets would be a fun thing to send people. It was pretty horrifying. Everyone found it pretty horrifying.
By which I mean, second off, what the hell do you mean “a new instance of West condemning East?”
The righteous fury of the Chinese internet was unleashed on these companies, no Western condemnation needed. Because again, everybody found it pretty horrifying.
But you don’t see the Chinese people in this story that’s ostensibly about people and their pets.
Now, the bottom of the New Yorker article mentions this – that the title of this when it went to print was “Pet Projects.” In which case, I guess you can consider what Dog Rambo Jesus does to be to be a pet project since it’s certainly not leading to any systemic change in China.
But then that makes the whole middle part about what pets mean to us once we’re done using them as sources of comfort for our pandemic loneliness... encounter the same damn problem of… what? What is about? Basically nothing really explains why this writer and some editor thought it would be cool to smash two completely different 3000+ word features into one.
One of which, again, is fine and I would possibly actually read 6000 words about.
The other of which is racist trash that makes China out to be something strange and cruel, while erasing all the Chinese people who are actually doing something about the one strange and cruel thing it’s picked up on.
All while conflating that strange and cruel thing with a completely unrelated global issue. You might as well have said the Yulin Dog Meat Festival is tied to climate change.
And this is important to realize because it’s one of the big problems with trying to inject any sanity into the concept of US-Sino relations.
It’s why, when Wuhan first declared to go lockdown, everything was about 1) how Chinese people eat gross animals, but also 2) how Chinese people have no rights because they’re being quarantined.
Rather than, hey, globally we might want to take this seriously because we don’t know exactly where it came from (coronavirus in general is zoonotic) and it seems to be both pretty dangerous and pretty contagious, considering someone made the hard decision to put the 8th largest city in China into Lockdown. In US terms, that’s San Diego… but about five times the population.
It’s why when China was developing several vaccines in tandem, the New York Times chose to run a story about how eww gross they use hamster fetuses… which is what all labs internationally, including ones in the USA, use by the way… and the Biden administration chose to take a Global Corporate War approach, allies like India and Japan versus China, to vaccine development.
Rather than everyone pushing as hard as they can cooperation across all vaccine labs. Which is a problem now that India has been hit so hard by the Delta variant that the billion vaccines it had promised it was producing now needs to go to its own incredibly underserved public.
It’s why lab leak theory is now some gotcha buzzword.
Imagine having worked as you could, amongst dying colleagues, to sequence a mystery virus in record times… to have engaged in all agreed to protocols to share that with the rest of the world. Only to be accused a year later of releasing a bio-weapon by unhinged political opportunists who just saw the title but TL;DRed the memo.
Which is terrible because this is not the only virus we’re going to come across in our lives.
We need to be working together closer than ever to ensure everyone is ready globally to confront the next one. As long as there’s nearly 8 billion people living next to high concentrations of animals – doesn’t matter if it’s bats or dogs or pigs or cows or chickens – we are going to get another zoonotic infection.
Okay, so obviously one New Yorker piece is not going to be the Franz Ferdinand of our future pandemic WWI.
But this kind of thinking, continually spread in the United States can be. And that is just incredibly awful to think about.
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