Chinese citizens in China do NOT see criticisms on Twitter of the Yulin dog meat festival

I think we, in the West, are wasting our time criticising the Yulin dog meat festival or on any other animal welfare issue expressed on Western social media channels. You will find lots of criticism on Twitter of this event which is not a festival. It is a barbaric orgy of cruelty against dogs. That is a far better description but it won't have any impact on the Chinese in China because they won't see my description.

Chinese citizens in China do NOT see criticisms on Twitter of the Yulin dog meat festival. Image: MikeB

They won't see some fantastic tweets by some fantastic animal advocates using Twitter to spread the word to campaign against this openly and obviously barbaric practice.

Twitter is officially blocked in China although many Chinese people circumvent the blockage to use it. Major Chinese companies use Twitter through a government approved VPN.

However, the Great Firewall of China has now engulfed the VPN service providers as well. The CCP have a stranglehold on what their citizens can read on the Internet. They want people to read what they deliver to them. They want to indoctrinate them.

They need to do that for the obvious reason that it keeps them in power. It keeps the 1.4 billion citizens lobotomized on the issue of animal cruelty. It stops them from objecting to the political process in China which is a form of dictatorship.

And so, the cultural traditions of China which are brought forward from 1000-2000 years ago are as strong as ever. The only way they're going to break free of these traditions, which are often based upon dangerous superstitions leading to to gross animal abuse such as the Yulin dog festival, is to educate.

And the best way to educate nowadays is through reading this kind of article on the Internet. It seems to me that we in the West we are preaching to ourselves. We are preaching to the converted.

It's a bit like a person having a bacterial infection deep inside their body. Perhaps in the kidney. Or in their sinuses. You are given an antibiotic but it doesn't reach the infected area.

The truth is that internet surveillance and censorship has been tightly implemented by the CCP. They block major websites such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and as mentioned Twitter. Apparently, Gmail is also blocked in China.

You either get spoon-fed with what the CCP want to give you as a Chinese citizen living in China or you don't read anything on the Internet at all.

There a picture on Twitter of a young man being highly abusive towards a dog at the Yulin dog festival. And he is joyous in his abuse of this poor animal. My heart weeps for the dog. The dog is dead now and therefore out of his misery. But the joy on the brute's face was shocking.

It reflected the complete ignorance of the individual as to what they were doing. The concept of sentience is unknown to this person. How are we, in the West, going to change things in the East if that is what we should do? I think we need to do it because animal welfare is an international cause.

There should be no boundaries to international animal welfare because country borders do not apply to animals. It is deeply distressing and upsetting to write about these things and to know that we are probably wasting our time.