Izzy Went to Yulin

Every June in Yulin, a city in China’s Guangxi province, approximately fifty thousand dogs and cats—some illegally bred, some caught off the street—end up in cooking pots as part of a local summer solstice tradition. Western animal-rights groups have been trying to get it banned for years. Every year it continues.

Izzy went to see it for herself. What she found was grim in the way that reality usually is: dogs packed into cages too small to turn around in, vendors working behind stalls that smelled exactly how you’re imagining, and a small boy who refused to let anyone near his pet. The images aren’t sensationalist. They’re just matter-of-fact, which is worse.

The festival’s defenders make the argument you’d expect: that outrage over dog meat is culturally selective, that industrial cattle and pig slaughter happens at far greater scale and nobody stages protests over it. It’s not a wrong argument. It’s also not a satisfying one—the conditions at Yulin weren’t exactly humane by any standard, local or otherwise. When I asked Izzy what dog actually tastes like, she shrugged: A bit like lamb. We both sat with that for a moment.