China has alot to answer for with their poor record on animal rights.

The news that Jeremy Corbyn will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping this week during a state delegation and Royal banquet in honour of the Chinese President in London is encouraging.

 

The leader of the opposition will be allowed to voice human rights concerns within China. In contrast George Osborne is having to sweet talk the delegation into investing over £100 billion in our country for the next decade.  There is also the joint EDF and Chinese nuclear reactor project for Hinkley Point ready to be signed up to. Of course the Government pretends that this is business investment but the truth is that we don’t have the skills to build anything nowadays so we require a French state owned company and a Chinese state owned collaboration together to build, own and run a power station for us.

 

Nevertheless, it is not just the human rights record of China that Jermey Corbyn should be shouting about, the Chinese also have a grotesque record of animal abuse. The Yulin meat festival where dogs are skinned alive and then thrown into boiling water still continues. Many of the ten thousand or so dogs brutally killed in the festival have been stolen or are strays rounded up, yet any protest by animal rights groups against these festivals is quickly dispersed by under cover police.  It is not that it is illegal to eat dogs and cats in China it is the supply chain and the method of dispatch that is illegal at this festival.

 

The US and China have now agreed a ban on ivory, which should help to end the global trade, and put a stop to the illegal destruction of rhinos and elephants around the world. Should the ban be policed in China as poorly as the above example of the meat festival, like the rhino, the world’s elephants will have small reprieve.

 

Let’s not forget Mahatma Gandhi, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated”.