The spectator sport China DOESN'T want you to see

[Dion]

A man hoisted up the goat and nonchalantly threw it over a wall into a pit full of hungry lions. The poor goat tried to run for its life, but it didn't stand a chance. The lions quickly surrounded it and started tearing at its flesh.




"Oohs" and "aahs" filled the air as the children watched the goat being ripped limb from limb. Some started to clap silently with a look of wonder in their eyes.

The scenes witnessed at Badaltearing Safari Park in China are rapidly becoming a normal day out for many Chinese families.

The tourists were then herded onto buses and driven through the lions' compound to watch an equally cruel spectacle. The buses have specially designed chutes down which you can push live chickens and watch as they are torn to shreds.

Zoos like this make me want to boycott everything Chinese," says Emma Milne, star of the BBC's Vets In Practice.

"I'd like to rip out everything in my house that's made in China. I have big problems with their culture.

"If you enjoy watching an animal die then that's a sad and disgusting reflection on you.

"Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by their behaviour towards animals, as the value of human life is so low in China."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...3&page_id=1811

[Option84]

Personally I never trust anything from the dailymail uk. It's like their tabloid paper.

[Staypuft]

I thought this was another "American Gladiators" thread...

[Dion]

Originally Posted by Option84

Personally I never trust anything from the dailymail uk. It's like their tabloid paper.

Is this a tabloid?

Do think the video in the link was staged?

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegrap...001021,00.html

[Hack&Lube]

Despite the source of the story, the pictures don't lie and I have see much more horrific stuff from china in regards to both animal and human rights from much more veritable sources and even direct first person sources.

I'm of Chinese descent but I despise everything China is today. I've vowed never to visit there...and it's a product of culture in many ways but it doesn't make it less attrocious to me (a person who is already a cynical heartless realist).

[Daradon]

Lamb, while spectator, dies to feed lions.

Crowd cheers.

I dunno. The lions are fed. The lamb would die in a farm anyway.

Maybe they offset the damage by donating to WWF?

Not nearly as bad as so much more out there.

China or North America.

This is silly. Aminals feed on other animals. Is it unfair for us to set it up. Hells ya! But is it weird? No. Is it outside the bounds of nature. No.

I must be missing something here. I'm a 'normal' animal rights activist.

By that I mean, I recognise people eat meat. I boycott companies and practices where animals are made to suffer abnormal amounts of pain or suffer a longer period of time and where animals are wasted.

I think we eat too much meat. I think we waste life. I want to curb this.

But... I don't deny the importance of meat in an animals diet. And we are animals.

The disconnect is that vegetarians want it both ways (for the most part). They want to be above meat, but part of the environmental system.

Sorry. Either we are gods or animals. Can't shake a hand and make a fist.

Let's be god and realize we control the system now. Lets have our meat but use it wisely.

I was kudosing a thread maker 3 weeks ago for showing cruelty in the fur industry and now these stranger stories make it in.

Someone said nuking a cat was the same as eating a hamburger.

Cut out the hyperbole and the self rightousness. PLEASE!

Death is not the same as torture.

Death is not the same as waste.

And one high profile lamb is not the same as ongoing waste that we see every day in various industries.

This has nothing to do with China (though they have a very bad track record)

This is one lamb, unfortunately for it, getting fed to lions. Which would probably eat it anyway.

We feed our dogs, cats and fish.

And ourselves.

No different.

Get off your horses and get back to the real problems.

Stop waste.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Daradon

Lamb, while spectator, dies to feed lions.

Crowd cheers.

I dunno. The lions are fed. The lamb would die in a farm anyway.

Maybe they offset the damage by donating to WWF?

Not nearly as bad as so much more out there.

China or North America.

This is silly. Aminals feed on other animals. Is it unfair for us to set it up. Hells ya! But is it weird? No. Is it outside the bounds of nature. No.

I must be missing something here. I'm a 'normal' animal rights activist.

By that I mean, I recognise people eat meat. I boycott companies and practices where animals are made to suffer abnormal amounts of pain or suffer a longer period of time and where animals are wasted.

But, let's start at the beginning folks.

One lamb per episode vs the 30,000 chickens per day at KFC?

Just cause you see or don't see it doesn't change it.

If you want to make a difference, look at waste. Not at hollywood.

I was kudosing a thread maker 3 weeks ago and now these stranger stories make it in.

You are one of those people for whom the ends are all that counts. However that KFC got in your bucket it doesn't matter to you. That chicken was going to die anyway...when in actuality that chicken lived a horrible life, was thrown around alive a factory by stressed out night workers, was chained by it's feet and dipped into a electrified water bath before being flash par-boiled alive to get rid of feathers. That's for food and the most efficient industrial process. Fine. I eat my KFC (prefer Chicken on the Way) without an iota of guilty conscience...But for crowds to take absolute pleasure in a young animal being ripped to shreds in an arena is something different isn't it?

Have you ever owned a pet? Felt a smidge of empathy for another living, sentient, feeling, conscious creature? A strong unified thread in much of the Endlösung der Judenfrage was the fact that the leadership did not have the capacity to feel this difference. The wholesale killing of human beings was to them just another industrial process with animals. That is where your logic ultimately leads.

Maybe we are an American Gladiator society but I thought we were over the Roman Gladiator society...or are we going to let footballers run their underground dog fights now? And if you actually read the article, this is not a hollywood show, I have no idea where you are going with that angle. It's a daily occurance at a Chinese Zoo. Western Zoos (while guilty of their own mistreaments and malpractices) teach children animal conservation and appreciation of nature. This zoo only teaches an appreciation of maximal carnage and cruel, heartless spectacle to further fuel a generation of children who have no hindrances in abusing nature among many other things if only for pecuniary gain and savage entertainment.

My own parents were in China a month ago. They saw such disgusting practices as "entertainment" in many places in China. They are accepted as commonplace. One popular act is to have fake "traditional chinese fisherman" sitting in rivers to entertain foreigners on boat tours who then have to tip these performers. These "fishermen" would have a flock of pelican like birds (chained together by invisible fishing wire so they can't escape). These fishermen would pretend they have mastered the art of getting these pelicans to fish for them when in fact, their gullets have been tied off (almost to the point of asphyxiation) so that they can barely breathe and never actually swallow. Then they will have a "net" under the water (that people aren't supposed to know is there) full of fish. They will throw these birds off their raft into the water and the starving thin birds will surface with fish and try desperately to swallow them but they can't since their necks are tied off and they literally choke until the performer removes the fish, gets his tips, then later throws back the fish.

So to your statement that either we are gods or we are animals. I guess we are animals then. Let's fire up some gas chambers and load up the batch fryers at KFC! It's all the same in the end! Doesn't matter what we show our children as respectable or what our society considers to be humane! Food on the plate, money in the pocket, and a 3rd reich to go!

[Daradon]

^ I boycott KFC because of how it got in my bucket.

I also boycott McDonalds and other meat farms that are suppliers.

I am sorry if I edited while you wrote back to me.

But I think you are missing my point.

That is the precise reason I boycott KFC. Because the chickens have a bad life.

I don't know where this lamb/sheep came from. But it obviously wasn't produced for mass comsumption and therefore I must assume didn't do too poorly.

I don't know. I'm saying I don't know.

But I'd rather get pissed at the fast food industry than a zoo in China.

I'm saying a lot of people cry over this lamb cause they see it, rather than the 30,000 chicks they don't see every day grounded to meal.

And they are ill informed. This thread does not help to inform them (in it's inception). It's a cheap attempt at fear wthout touching the issues.

[Daradon]

I guess what I'm saying is I know that animal rights in China are bad.

But I can't point a finger at China when we do a little better (still bad) on a MUCH LARGER SCALE.

It's brutal there yes, cause the cruelty hits so close to home.

But we process like a machine. We have no reason to point.

Do we like watching the animals die? Maybe not. But do we like to pretend that they never did? YUP!

Is one worse than the other?

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Daradon

Do we like watching the animals die? Maybe not. But do we like to pretend that they never did? YUP!

Is one worse than the other?

I guess what I'm saying is I know that animal rights in China are bad.

But I can't point a finger at China when we do a little better (still bad) on a MUCH LARGER SCALE.

It's brutal here yes, cause the cruelty hits so close to home.

But we process like a machine. We have no reason to point.

Death is not the same as torture.

Death is not the same as waste.

And one high profile lamb is not the same as ongoing waste that we see every day in various industries.

There's a reason those machines are behind the closed doors of a slaughterhouse, many people in western society would be disagreeable to seeing what actually goes on. This however is a public spectacle being enjoyed by the masses and sold at a profit. This goat wasn't fed to the lions because it was part of their normal and neccessary diet. It was because an audience paid to see it thrown into the lion's den to run for it's life and then be mauled to shreds. There's a vast difference between the large scale industrialization of the processing of animals for neccessary food...and the cruel treatment of animals for entertainment purposes, mostly as to what it says about the audience's view and attitude toward fellow creatures be they animal or ultimately even human. When you enjoy and tolerate this, is there much difference between throwing a goat into a pen of lions or riding a bus and throwing live chickens down a chute to predators... and rounding up the neighbourhood dogs and having them kill each other in the basement? This is not an issue of the efficiency and waste of the industrial production of food...this is an issue of a society which does not recognize the concept of inhumane treatment or cruelty to animals or the logical progression - fellow man.

You seem to be arguing that you consider waste to be more pressing an issue than torture. I simply don't understand that. Also, as an aside, since the food industry in N.A. is predicated on capitalism, it is by default one of the most ridiculously efficient and least wasteful industries in the industrialized world. Literally everything that comes from a farmed animal is used believe it or not. Even those chicken feathers from the KFC factory are pulped into protein feed or fertilizer for other animals simply because that's how you make the most money.

[Daradon]

This is funny cause it's the exact opposite of what I was debating in the kitty/mircowave thread.

There I was arguing that was worse than eating animals cause fo the torture and joy taken in it.

I still stand by that.

So you probably ask me why I find this different?

I don't. But I don't do it. And I don't condone it.

I think it's terrible. I'm just saying, don't point fingers when we do the same thing with our eyes closed.

I guess if I need to draw a list from bad to not so bad (for clarification, although now getting still cause each act is obviously seperate) the questions I'd ask are this.

What was the animal used for?
In it's use did it go to waste?
Or rather did it go for benefit?
Was there respect in the killing?
Was the killing truly necessary?

I guess the big thing for me in this situation is that, the animals were killed for other animals, which made it both less wasteful and more necessary than other western practices. It's still barbaric yes. But compared to the waste that happens in our food and livestock and clothing industry, I don't see how this is that much worse.

Animals eating other animals. Yes humans are cheering and that's bad.

But it's hungry animals eating other animals. Rather than fat humans throwing away chicken mcnuggets they didn't finish, or wearing mink coats fed by baby chicks.

Animals getting fed vs humans wasting animals...

I think the spectacle is your problem, not the waste or the logic.



P.S. Blame game? This thread started the blame game. Please. I'm trying to qualify and quantify the human emotional reaction for both moral and logical reaction. I'm not throwing blame around at all. In fact I said, 'don't point fingers'.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Daradon

P.S. Blame game? This thread started the blame game. Please. I'm trying to qualify and quantify the human emotional reaction for both moral and logical reaction. I'm not throwing blame around at all. In fact I said, 'don't point fingers'.

Blame game as in you are making this is "don't point the fingers at China since we are doing it ourselves behind closed doors" argument. This is the same as closing your eyes and ignoring the problem by saying hey, there's enough of a problem here that it mitigates the mania caused by a story such as this or makes people hypocritical or ignorant to reality.

Honestly, I don't see a problem in North America and in Europe. I'm fine with the western industrialized food supply chain. It is brutally efficient. Believe or not, farmed animals are a renewable resource! Waste is not an issue for me whatsoever (conservation however is). I don't know why it is such a big deal for you. The food and livestock and clothing industry in Western nations is extremely efficient just because they can make money on every last byproduct and scrap they can salvage.

[arsenal]

How is it any different than watching lions and tigers hunt in the wild? Have none of you seen a nature show about large cats? What would make this more humane? Let dinner run around more?

Personally, I think large cats should be fed more live food. It would help with their natural instincts, and would allow people to see how they hunt in the wild. I guess its better to turn a blind eye to actually what happens before the animals get their chunk of meat.

That being said, it should not be done for purely entertainment purposes. That's just sick.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by arsenal

How is it any different than watching lions and tigers hunt in the wild?

I can't remember the actual statistic but it's something like 60% of gazelles usually escape being chased by a lion. It's a pointless stat and ultimately meaningless but they do get away quite a lot in nature. That has nothing to do with this topic.

The entire point is the societal attitude toward animal rights or lack thereof also translates to other social behaviors that are somewhat disturbing to westerners and even myself, somebody who is Chinese. It's not a sentimental concern about the poor animals that get eaten by lions or butchered in slaughterhouses. This is about cultural attitudes and how they reflect on a people and the kinds of things they derive entertainment from that are literally outlawed in most western nations.

Watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBIg80dkB4U

Did you enjoy it? Well it's just pirhana's getting fed which is a neccesity and even something that could happen in nature...But in nature it's not by your hand. Is there a more humane way of doing it? Of course...but then it wouldn't be so damn entertaining...Do you feel for the mouse or do you cheer the pirhanas?

I'll admit, I smiled once when I first watched that video but I'm not going to pat myself on the back or pay to see it. I killed birds with rocks when I was a kid, I enjoyed it up until after I realized what I just did. Haunts me to this day. It's probably part of an evolutionary instinct (stronger when you are young, like how kittens play-fight to learn hunting skills as adults) to enjoy hunting/killing/using violence as those were all neccessary and beneficial survival skills for our ancestors...but in today's day and age, it sickens me to see such things in Mainland China and this isn't because of this one isolated spectacle but many others prevalent things I have seen and heard first-hand reports of in terms of both animal and human cruelty...or just plain bad manners.

[Option84]

Not to be nitpicky, but that second website you posted seems tabloidish to me too. I mean their headline is Mongolion Beef. Excuse me? When did Mongolia become China? Not to mention the xenophobic borderline racist comments are allowed through their moderation staff like

"Ive always suspected that the Chinese are short on normal human decency. This confirms my opinion of them. They really are the dregs of the human race.
Posted by: Brian Tyas of Harrington 3:02pm January 07, 2008"

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Option84

Not to be nitpicky, but that second website you posted seems tabloidish to me too. I mean their headline is Mongolion Beef. Excuse me? When did Mongolia become China? Not to mention the xenophobic borderline racist comments are allowed through their moderation staff like

"Ive always suspected that the Chinese are short on normal human decency. This confirms my opinion of them. They really are the dregs of the human race.
Posted by: Brian Tyas of Harrington 3:02pm January 07, 2008"

Just to be nitpicky again but Mongols are a very large part of China and deeply, deeply connected to Chinese history, some of the longest Chinese dynasties and their respective emperors were Mongols.

[Option84]

Yeah well would you like it if you were referred to as American because Canadian and American is "pretty much the same thing"?

I sure as hell wouldn't.

[Cowboy89]

Yet another example illustrating how just because another culture is different doesn't make it better. Seems to be the past 20 years or so we are all too happy to bash our own culture and while trying to embrace other cultures we seem to not hold them up to the same standards we hold our own.

Micheal Vick is a clear example of this. In 21st Century American culture, staging dog fights and excuting the loser in brutal fashion for entertainment purposes is considered wrong. Some Vick apologists try to say that it's part of African-American culture to stage dog fights. If you truly believe it's a wrong practice why would anyone let him off the hook because it's his culture?

When people talk of culture clash I recall reading about the British soldiers occupying India. In India it was common practice to burn alive the widow of a dead man with his body shortly after his death. When the British soldiers took exception to this practice the locals made a cultural arguement that this was common practice and thus the British should allow it. The commander responded "In our culture it's common practice to hang whoever would do such a thing, so go build your fire and we'll build our hanging post right beside it."

[Thunderball]

Yes, animals need to be fed, and because of the food chain, some cute, furry animals are eaten by bigger/meaner cute, furry animals.

What makes this grotesque is not the act of lions eating a goat... its the morbid enjoyment that the humans get from it. We're not supposed to adore where our meat comes from, we're supposed to simply appreciate that its there and we didn't have to go kill it ourselves.

[ernie]

I realize that such a spectacle isn't for everybody and I'd not bring my kids to see such a thing in a zoo. That's my choice. I would however pay good money to have my family witness such a thing in the wild.

I understand this is different in that the lions clearly don't have to work for the food here and it is inevitable the goat is killed...but that is inevitable anyways.

It's sad to a point but it's pretty far down on my "what makes the world suck" list.