Dog-eating in China & Gadhi Mai mass sacrifice in Nepal both near an end

Decline of the activist & mass media exaggeration factors reflects the decline of the bloody realities

BEIJING,  KATHMANDU––Major good news out of China and Nepal on December 9 and December 11,  2024 came disguised to the point of invisibility for those unfamiliar with the details.

Even as animal advocates wring hands and weep over sensational mass media reports and fundraising appeals that not only misreport the context,  but garble almost every stated fact,  reality is that both dog-eating in China and the Gadhi Mai mass animal sacrifice held every five years in Baryatpur,  Nepal have never been closer to ending.

Peter J. Li reports good news for dogs

Take the dog-eating news from University of Houston associate professor of East Asian politics Peter J. Li.

A lifelong animal advocate,  Li emigrated from China to the United States in 1994.  Li doubles as a China policy specialist for Humane Society International,  the global arm of the Humane Society of the U.S.

Li,  making frequent fact-finding visits to China,  has closely monitored the dog meat traffic for thirty years.

Posted Li to his Facebook page,  “On November 25,  2024,  Chinese animal lovers succeeded in helping stop a criminal shipment of some 400 dogs,  mostly rural guard dogs stolen in central China’s Henan province.

400 dogs rescued

“After 72 hours confrontation,  the local authorities sided with the country’s animal activists,”  as has frequently occurred all over China since 2006,  “and confiscated all 400 dogs who had been brutalized in the hands of the traders.

“The rescued dogs have been moved to the care of a local animal shelter.  Humane Society International’s China partner group,  Vshine Animal Protection Association,  and the Capital Animal Welfare Association,”  the oldest Chinese animal advocacy and rescue society,  “helped in the final stage of the settlement.

“China’s dog meat trade is sustained by criminal activities that hold the Chinese government’s authority in contempt,”  Li explained.

“There are no dog farms in the country,”  Li said.

Dog meat farms were attempted,  but went bust

Li was not the first to report this.

Twenty-one years earlier the late John Wedderburn told the 2003 Asia for Animals conference in Hong Kong,  after extensive travel in China,  that the dog meat farms he and a network of Chinese contacts had been able to discover were all relatively recently built,  yet already either out of business or failing and being converted to raise pigs.

(See Asian Animal Protection Network founder John Wedderburn, 83.)

“Most dogs destined for slaughter are stolen rural guard dogs,”  Li wrote,  updating earlier reports that most were stolen pets,  before awareness of pet theft rose among urban dog owners.

Illegal transport

“The transportation of these dogs across provincial boundaries is brutal,”  Li continued.

Transporting dogs to slaughter across provincial boundaries is also illegal.

Legally trafficking dogs across provincial boundaries for any purpose would require that each dog have proof of current vaccination against rabies.

Chinese law,  however,  also prohibits selling animals who have been vaccinated against rabies for human consumption.

This is not a new point,  either,  having previously been made at a June 2011 Beijing media conference convened by the Shangshen Animal Foundation.

Speakers then,  including attorneys Lu Xun,  An Xiang,  and Cai Chunhang,  with China Veterinary Association Pet Clinic Branch vice president Liu Lang,  presented examples of how they had used these existing laws to stop illegal transports of dogs for slaughter in at least eight provinces.

The significance of Li’s report is that the momentum from 2003 and 2011 continues.

The most notorious alleged dog-eater lately is RFK Jr.

Dog-eating in China today appears to be no more popular than Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,  nominated by president-elect Donald Trump to head the Department of Health & Human Services,  found that it is among Americans back in 2010.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. allegedly recommended a South Korean dog meat restaurant to a friend,  text-messaging to the friend a photo of himself pretending to take a bite from a carcass roasted on a spit,  and is still hearing about it.

“This trade tarnishes China’s global image,  an issue that no efforts by Chinese diplomats or panda ‘ambassadors’ in foreign zoos can improve,”  said Li.

(See Why Guangzhou dog rescue reveals more about China than Yulin dog-eating festival.)

“Dog Meat Is Out!”

Li had better news only three days later.

“Dog Meat Is Out!”  Li bannered on Facebook.

“Liaoning Provincial Commerce Bureau released on December 10,  2024 a list of 196 landmark foods with cultural connotations,  traditional craftsmanship,  and prominent regional characteristics at the city level,”  Li explained.

“Dog meat is NOT on the list.  To qualify for the list,  a food product must be truly traditional, safe, meeting national food nutrition standards,  having a good reputation,  and violating no national or local laws for environmental and wildlife protection,”  detailed Li.

“An example for others to follow”

“Originally, dog meat was entered by a city.  However,”  Li reported,  “it was disqualified as a result of opposition from voices both within and without the government.

“Liaoning,  situated in northeast China,  one of the main dog meat markets,  has created an example for other provinces in the region and the nation to follow,”  Li wrote.

“Dog meat has never been part of the mainstream food culture of China in the last 1,500 years,”  Li asserted.  “Traditionally, those who consumed dogs quietly were thugs and hooligans who also did other criminal acts like making fake money,  abusing women and bullying the poor.

“The dog meat trade is a relatively new business that arose in the 1980s,”  Li said.  “The trade in the form that it is today did not exist in Mao’s China (1949-1978).  It did not exist in Nationalist China (1911-1949).  Neither did it exist in the country’s dynastic past since the Sui dynasty (581-618 CE.  Dog meat is NOT a common food in China.”

Marco Polo

An asterisk may be added to that.

The 14th century Italian explorer Marco Polo mentioned specifically that the people of Kinsay,  the city now known as Hangzhou,  “eat every kind of flesh,  even that of dogs and other unclean beasts,  which nothing would induce a Christian to eat.”

However,  though Marco Polo wrote extensively of the dietary habits of the other cities he visited in China,  and introduced several Chinese foods to Italy upon his return 24 years later,  reputedly including spaghetti,  he did not mention that dogs were eaten anywhere except Hangzhou.

Neither Marco Polo list either dogs or cats among the 13 animal species he found offered for sale at the Hangzhou live market,  a hint that while dogs and cats were eaten sometimes,  they were not eaten often enough to be offered in commerce.

Realities of Gadhi Mai sacrifice are,  as usual,  exaggerated

Meanwhile in Baryatpur,  Nepal,  CNN reporter Esha Mitra on December 10,  2024 shocked the world by reporting that,  “At least 4,200 buffaloes and thousands of goats and pigeons were killed during a mass sacrifice near the Nepal/India border,”  apparently without checking Google Earth to see if 4,200 buffalo could even fit into the Baryatpur sacrificial arena,  or within the village of Baryatpur itself.

ANIMALS 24-7 has repeatedly counted each and every slaughtered animal,  as depicted in ground-level videography in 2004 and 2009,  and drone video showing the entire arena in 2014 and 2019.  An estimate that 1,400 buffaloes and perhaps as many as 4,200 animals total were killed might be marginally plausible.

Goats & pigeons

None of the video from previous Gadhi Mai sacrifices,  however,  has showed significant numbers of goats.  Some of the video,  plus the sacrificial customs at the Dakchankali Temple near Kathmandu,  the biggest sacrificial temple in Nepal,  suggests that many and perhaps most of the pigeons are released alive.

(See Exposing the truth of the Gadhi Mai sacrificial slaughter and Gadhi Mai 2019: more animals killed than in 2014, but fewer people watched.)

Baryatpur mayor Prasad Yadav,  misidentified by Mitra of CNN as “the mayor of Gadhi Mai,”  told Mitra that,  “The sacrifice this year was limited.”

“Campaigning to end the slaughter for a decade”

That much is probably true.

“Animal rights groups have been campaigning to end the slaughter for a decade,”  Mitra continued,  “but have faced resistance from community members who are honoring a custom dating back more than 200 years.”

Reality is that there appears to be no unequivocal written documentation of any mass animal sacrifice having been held at Bariyarpur before 1999.

Not even one word about the alleged local goddess Gadhi Mai or the Gadhi Mai sacrifices appears in the 400-page reference book Religions In Nepal,  by Trilok Chandra Majupuria and his son Rojit Kumar,  although they do list many other Nepalese sacrificial festivals.

(See Books shed light on sacrifice in Nepal.)

Gyanendra

Former Nepalese king Gyanendra Bir Bikram Dev, a blood sacrifice enthusiast, poured money into encouraging animal slaughter on sacrificial occasions,  not only at Bariyarpur but elsewhere around Nepal during his brief reign, 2001-2006.

The present Bariyarpur infrastructure for sacrifice dates only to Gyanendra’s reign.

“Before this year’s festival,”  Mitra wrote,  “animal rights activists mobilized on the India/Nepal border to help Indian police intercept and confiscate animals suspected of being transported to the temple.

“Efforts have been focused on the border,”  Mitra recounted,  “since a 2014 ruling by the Indian Supreme Court that ordered the Indian government to prevent the illegal crossing of animals.

“In all,”  Mitra said,  “activists saved more than 750 animals,  including 69 buffaloes,  325 goats, 328 pigeons and two chickens,  who will be re-homed or released to the wild.”

“Hundreds of thousands to millions”?!

The CNN report by Esha Mitra was downright restrained compared to the nonsense amplified by Chad de Guzman for Time magazine online.

De Guzman alleged that “hundreds of thousands to millions of Hindus,”  who mostly do not practice animal sacrifice,  “flock to” the Gadhi Mai temple.

“Hundreds of thousands to millions” would be more people than could fit into the entire mountainous Bara region,  population 200,000,  given standing room only.

“During the last festival in 2019, as many as 250,000 creatures were beheaded, according to animal welfare group Humane Society International,”  De Guzman claimed.

The verifiable 2019 toll was about 1,500.   The highest toll estimated by witness was 1,900.

Andrew Rowan

“According to Humane Society International,  an estimated 500,000 animals were slaughtered in 2009,”  De Guzman wrote.

Indeed,  then-Humane Society International chief executive Andrew Rowan issued such a claim,  in an online fundraising appeal distributed on October 2,  2014,  but without a scrap of data to support it.

So where did such outlandish numbers come from?

Exaggeration of the Gadhi Mai body counts appears to have begun with the local priests who profit by the sale of rendered remains of animals offered in sacrifice.

The organization Beauty Without Cruelty-India discovered in 2014 that local priests appeared to be selling the right to sacrifice each donated animal multiple times to absentee sponsors.

Beauty Without Cruelty-India

Dozens of sponsors might be told that each animal was sacrificed specifically to bring good fortune to themselves and their families.  As there were far more absentee sponsors than animals,  claiming inflated numbers were killed was done to help conceal the fraud.

Activists opposed to the sacrifices apparently then swallowed the inflated claims whole,  and exaggerated them further to try to drum up global support for protest.

(See Beauty Without Cruelty-India exposes Gadhi Mai scam.)

The good news is that when the exaggeration factor behind absurd claims drops from at least 333 times reality to maybe just triple reality,  the reality is almost certainly declining too,  to the point that the absurd claims are no longer plausible to anyone who actually looks at it.

(See also Gadhi Mai sacrifices stopped (a premature victory claim by Humane Society International);  Did the Gadhi Mai Temple Trust renege on deal to quit animal sacrifice? [the predictable outcome of the premature claim];  No karmic justice for activist who did most to end Gadhi Mai sacrifices,  detailing the work of Nepal Animal Welfare & Research Center founder Gita Prasad “Uttam” Dahal,  and his obituary,  Uttam Dahal, 33, was dynamo for animals in Nepal despite ill health.)

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