City axes twin over dog eating

A BRITISH city has dropped its twin affiliation with a Chinese province because the region hosts an annual dog meat festival.

Animal lovers demanded that council chiefs in Newport, South Wales, cut links with Guangxi in China because thousands of dogs are killed and eaten for fun at the ten-day event held in the city of Yulin.

A petition calling for the twinning to end after 23 years gained nearly 40,000 signatures. The council initially wrote a strongly worded letter to their Chinese counterparts – but received no reply. Now, council leader Debbie Wilcox has said the association will end and Guangxi will be removed from all signs and literature in the area. She also pledged to ask Whitehall to call for the practice to come to an end.

Animal rights activists say dogs, including many pets, are slain and skinned inhumanely in public places during the festival.

Claire Bass, of Humane Society International UK, said the Yulin festival was ‘one small but distressing example’ of China’s dog meat trade, which is ‘first and foremost about crime and cruelty’.