The heinous Yulin Dog Meat Festival has come and gone. We would like to share some positive updates from our Yulin team:
This year, Jie Guan (street supervisor) forced at least 50 temporary dog meat vendors from the street. This is the largest number and largest coverage by far. Local police stayed much longer and with more police manpower this year near the most popular dog meat restaurant, The First Crispy Dog Meat Restaurant,
"The festival has peaked and will only continue to go down," concluded our 10 team members, who were observing from 5 strategic locations. They believe the reasons are:
1) Because the excitement and chaos created by outsiders (foreigners and Chinese) is gone this year, not many spectators showed up. In the past this made the infamous dog meat festival an exciting tourist event.
2) The large # of temporary street dog meat vendors being forced out.
3) There is a rumor going around that the First Crispy Dog Meat Restaurant bought quite a few poisoned dogs.
4) Our community outreach events since 2014 have made some changes after 5 years. "Eating dog is gradually being perceived as a disgusting and "old fart" behavior by young people," says Xiao Long, a local bartender.
Nature helped too. Because of the warm winter weather, the lychee fruit was way under-produced this season. Yulin dog-eaters like to eat dog meat w/ lychee, so some of them decided to pass dog meat this year.
Duo Duo Project is pleased to get some good feedback. But of course, one dog being slaughtered is one too many. Alas, we have to deal with reality. Eating dog meat a century old habit, it takes time to change it.
Since 2014 Duo Duo Project has stayed in Yulin after all the cameras and activists have gone. We will continue to stay until we know the seeds are well-planted and we can see the flowers are blooming.
We will continue share with you what we have learned from our Executive Director's 14 trips to Yulin and what we plan to do in the coming year. All the work we do in Yulin takes money.
If you share our vision, please support us:
https://fundly.com/end-the-dog-meat