Dogs win in China, dog eaters lose

The Los Angeles Times has a story about the cancellation of a three-day dog-eating festival.

It was supposed to be held next month in Jinhua City. The tradition dates back six centuries.

The story included the following details:

Activists said 5,000 to 10,000 dogs would be butchered for the festival without regard to their suffering. Photographs and graphic accounts of the slaughter have circulated for the last few weeks over the Internet, with tens of thousands of people expressing outrage.

"Dogs would be stabbed, strangled and even beaten into comas and thrown into boiling water. Some dogs woke up in the extremely hot water and they struggled, but the vendors kept pushing them, plucking their fur," wrote one activist, Wang Lingyi, in a micro-blog posting.

The Internet has been cited as a factor in freeing people from tyranny, most notably during the Arab Spring. This might be the first high-profile example of the Internet saving thousands of canines from being slaughtered.

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