I think the problem I see here is you extrapolate a city (Yulin) to rest of China. The problem is China is not homogeneous in culture & more like a collection of small nations. At 1.3 billion, & size of a continent, you expect certain practices to be more dominance in certain region than others.
That's true, but I didn't say the practice was as common in the rest of China as it is in Yulin. I have no idea. I only pointed out that, in the one city I'm aware of where we have data, the practice is not "extremely rare," but in fact quite common.
Now, perhaps the practice is more common in Yulin than in China generally. Let's say it's twice as common in Yulin as elsewhere. I have no reason to believe that, but let's just make that assumption for argument's sake. That still leave us with 195,000 dogs per day, every day, being slaughtered for food in China. Something that happens 195,000 times a day, every day, cannot be called "extremely rare."
Maybe you are right that its not extremely rare, but it certainly very rare in modern cities like Shanghai, comparatively.
Maybe. All due respect to your friends in plastics, I'm not sure they're necessarily tuned in to everything that's going on in a city that size. All kinds of things can be happening, and if you're not plugged into the subculture, you just don't know about them. Maybe they don't travel in those circles. Maybe they don't want to know. I live in the South, and when the subject of racism comes up, there's always some old white guy who tells me racism is extremely rare down here. Sure it is. I'm not saying this is what's happening with your friends, but people have all kinds of ways of keeping themselves unaware of things they'd rather not be aware of. Heck, I sent the video JinCA posted to my siblings, and they didn't want to look at it. They'd rather not see it. Out of sight, out of mind.
What would be unfair is to judge a culture as massive as China due to subculture that is dominate in certain areas. It would be more meaningful to condemn the regions where the practice is engaged. Otherwise that would like condemning Britain as a nation as being violence because you saw some English football fans behaving like thugs.
You're objecting to blanket condemnations of China. I haven't made any blanket condemnations of China. I'm not even condemning the practice of eating dog meat. As I said before, eat the meat if you have to, but stop the burning alive, the skinning alive, the torture. That's what I condemn. But that's a different subject. We're just talking dog meat industry here. I was objecting to calling it "extremely rare." To my ears, and this may just be my interpretation, it sounds like you're minimizing it, saying "It's no big deal, nothing to worry about," doing the Iraqi Prime Minister thing. I admit I'm sensitive here, because I really object to the practice of torture (which is tied into the dog meat industry).
if you can find proof that it is homogeneous bad (or bad enough) in every/most regions, I will have no issue apologies for the statements made.
Well, that's going to be awfully hard to come by. Obviously, Chinese media can't be trusted to provide accurate information. So we have to rely on Humane Society and other similar organizations -- but most of their resources are going to rescue efforts, not large-scale investigations. Humane Society simply couldn't afford to undertake a China-wide investigation. So, all we have right now (afaik) is estimates for Yulin, which is where the media attention is focused. I agree that Yulin may not be representative of all of China -- in fact, I hope to God it is not.
