China Orders Dog-less Days for Summer Olympics

Last month the Beijing Catering Trade Association demanded that all 112 designated Olympic restaurants remove dog from their menus and refuse to serve the meat through the end of the summer games. BCTA went one step further by suggesting that all Beijing restaurants kindly remove canine from their menus and suggest less controversial dishes to anyone expressing an interest in eating man’s best friend.

In an opinion piece from yesterday’s New York Times, food writer Fuchsia Dunlop explores the reasons why dog meat is one of the few cultural concessions China seems to be making as the nation takes the world stage. Dunlop poses that from a publicity standpoint, China is making every effort to not seem “backward” to the Western world. And in the West, nothing seems to be a more sensitive issue than the consumption of household pets. When it comes to more significant matters of human rights violations and communist censorship, China appears steadfast in its indifference to Western opinion. Just last week journalists arriving in Beijing discovered they would not have unfettered access to the Internet, as the Chinese government had originally promised.

Reports suggest that approximately 300,000 dogs are killed in China every year for their meat. Some of that meat is exported to South Korea, where dog was similarly removed from menus in Seoul during their 1988 Olympics.