Every June for the past seven years, a city in Southern China celebrates the long Summer days of the Solstice with a festival like no other: the Lychee and Dog Meat Festival.
It’s exactly what it sounds like.
Over the course of about ten days in Yulin, it’s estimated that 10,000 dogs are consumed - a practice that the local government has distanced itself from, that celebrities like Matt Damon, Ricky Gervais and Carrie Fisher have publicly condemned, and that activists consistently strive to shut down.
While there's wide opposition to the festival both in China and overseas, killing dogs and selling them to customers on the street isn’t illegal in China.
But activists say the dogs at the Yulin Festival are either local strays, or domesticated animals that have been stolen from families and shipped for hours across the country.
Enter 37-year-old Hawaiian man Marc Ching.
“I see Yulin as basically a celebration of the cruelty of the killing of an animal. Which to me, is wrong,” Marc Ching told Hack.
Marc, leading his non-profit charity the Animal Hope and Wellness Foundation, has just returned from a trip to the festival in Yulin.
Over the past few years, he’s spent time in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia and Korea - to shut down slaughterhouses and save dogs from the commercial trade.
Today, the Yulin festival has ended, Marc Ching says his foundation has personally rescued over 1000 dogs, he’s received backlash from local activists, and he’s thinking about throwing in the towel and quitting his foundation altogether.
So...what happened?
Rescuing dogs from slaughter - how it works
Marc Ching says the biggest issue about the Yulin festival isn’t the fact that locals are buying and eating dog meat. For Marc, it’s the way in which dogs are killed, he told Hack.
“They believe if you abuse these animals before killing it makes the meat softer, the meat better or has more health benefits. That’s what Yulin celebrates. To me, it should be banned based on the cruelty aspect.”
A lot of people aren’t comfortable with the festival.
But you can’t waltz into another country and shut down a festival - just because its cultural values don’t line up with your own, right?
“I go undercover as a dog meat buyer and I document it secretly, and try to expose it to the government. The hangings, the beatings, the burning alive,” Marc explains.
Before heading to Yulin this year, Marc got in touch with twelve slaughterhouses, he told Hack, trying to temporarily shut them down.
Marc essentially pitched a buyout to twelve slaughterhouse owners: if they agreed to close up shop during the festival, he’d pay them the same amount of money they would typically make from selling dogs each day.
For slaughterhouse owners, it was a paycheck for nothing.
“When I landed in Yulin, we tried our best to close the deals, but we didn’t do all twelve. We were only able to shut down six slaughterhouses temporarily for the festival, which is better than nothing.
“Does it solve a problem? It might not. Was it the right thing to do? Maybe not. But the whole thing was about doing something different and to show people that maybe it is possible to end things.
“It’s all about hope.”
Backlash ensues
From there, Marc says they ran into a bigger problem than they anticipated. Over a thousand, not just a few hundred, dogs needed to be rehomed - ideally in countries other than China.
“So in the process of doing everything, I couldn’t leave those dogs.”
He says the number of dogs that need to be re-homed became a bigger problem than the festival itself. Criticism started coming in from local activist groups - who argue for a long-term solution to the festival, rather than a quick, logistical nightmare of a fix.
“I took a lot of criticism not from the slaughterhouses but local activists and groups within China,” Marc admits.
“These groups [were] saying you should have left them, you shouldn’t have done it, because it’s done nothing but made it worse, or it’s nothing on the long term effect on Yulin.”
But Marc compares the experience to warfare.
“It’s like war, you know when you go into war, and you have a plan, war dictates what you do. In rescue, when you’re in that situation, you do what you feel is best. So I couldn’t leave those dogs, so we rescued them. And we made it work.”
“Out of 1000-plus dogs, we have had 50 or so pass away. Which is better than all 1000 dogs being butchered and slaughtered and tortured.”
Taking its toll
On Facebook this week, Marc wrote a dramatic post to his 100,000 + loyal followers.
Here’s part of what he wrote:
The toll this has taken on my sanity, it has been decimating. I cannot think. I cannot breathe. And because I have become the dying, most likely I will make the decision to step down from the foundation. I am no good to these dogs. No good to the cause. No good to my own children.
“It’s destroying. I can’t even tell you - there’s no words to describe it,” Marc told Hack.
Whether you think that dogs are something to be eaten, whether you think that you know it’s meant to be consumed, you know it’s the torture. As human beings, that cannot be allowed. You cannot hang a dog and torture them and burn them alive. You cannot cut off their feet and smash their faces and laugh and enjoy doing it - because that is a line that should never have been allowed to exist.”
He says he’s thinking about stepping down from the foundation, but hasn’t made the call just yet.
“As far as documenting torture - I won’t anymore because I can’t. I feel I have enough to when I meet with the government , I can compel them to hopefully ban the dog meat trade.”
What about cows and chickens and pigs?
Compared to the global livestock and poultry industries, the Yulin Festival is a pretty small trade. And the treatment of animals in abattoirs, for example, can also be far from perfect.
Just last month, for example, video obtained by ABC’s 7:30 showed Australian cattle being bludgeoned to death with sledgehammers in Vietnam.
So why does Marc Ching focus on such a niche industry?
“So first of all, it’s good to point out that I’m vegan. Where some people see it as you’re eating man’s best friend, I don’t see it that way. I see it as the same as a chicken, a pig.
“However I focus on dogs and cats because I have a foundation that I can re-home dogs to.
“If I went in and closed down a slaughterhouse, and I took 2000 cows or 500 pigs, I really wouldn’t know what to do with them.
“You can’t save a life and not know what to do with that life.”
Do I have the right to tell you not to eat a cow or a pig? Probably not. But do I have the right to tell you to stop torturing something? I believe we all do.
“Because as human beings, we are all animals too and we have the right to share this Earth. Or at least, we should stand up against something so heinous as [the Yulin festival].
“I’m not trying to push a culture to do anything, but when cruelty or some type of tortuous belief is built in, I do believe that it should stop.”
Listen to Marc’s interview with Tom Tilley below.