There’s animal cruelty, and then there’s those who take helpless dogs, throw them in a pot of boiling water, and laugh as the poor animal screams in unbearable agony and suffers a terrible and painful death.

Thankfully, more and more people have woken up to the annual carnage and spectacle of savagery that is the Yulin Dog Meat Festival, but the recent number of online videos which have captured isolated incidents in China where dogs are being boiled alive is disturbingly on the increase.

In case you’re unaware, the Yulin Dog Meat Festival, which takes place every June, is not very festive for the thousands of dogs who are tortured, butchered, and devoured there.

These poor dogs, many stolen from loving homes, are kept in the foulest and most claustrophobic of conditions, before being dragged from their cages to meet a grisly fate which entails being beaten, gutted, skinned, or boiled alive.

Anything sadistic, no matter how foul, that can be done to the dogs is pretty much given the green light just to make the terrified creatures suffer an extreme fear which will scar their soul and shatter their mind in the long drawn-out moments before death.

And why? So their flesh tastes better to the gathered diners who gorge greedily upon the remains of what’s left after the torturers have finished their tormenting.

But here’s the million dollar question. Are we in the canine loving, meat-eating, and wealthy West right to criticise the actions of another culture who’ve simply got a different way of doing things?

Well, when it involves the needless suffering of an animal that since time out of mind has, and continues to enrich millions of people’s lives in a myriad of ways, you bet your bottom dollar we are.

It takes a wolf to catch a wolf, and although dogs can’t defend themselves from the cruelty of humans, other humans can and should.

Thanks to awareness and growing protests, during the last three years, the dog meat industry in Yulin and in China as a whole is shrinking, but as the video shows, any dog which is boiled alive is one too many for mother nature to stomach.

The dog’s howls of agony and the sound of it hitting the metal sheet lid placed on top of the pot as it makes futile attempts to escape should be enough to make the Earth groan and hang its head in despair.

Taking a creature which is the very essence of unconditional love, inspiring loyalty and a fierce devotion, and then placing it in a cauldron of boiling water to burn it alive as it flails around in a blind panic and loses its mind to the insanity of every nerve ending in its body being brutalized with a pain beyond words is surely the stuff of nightmares and should have no place in the waking world, but it does and it will – if people everywhere continue to turn a blind eye.

What can you say about the sort of monsters who boil a dog alive? How could such actions ever be defended or justified. Those who pride themselves on being hard of head and heart, and completely objective and devoid of emotion when it comes to the big picture will snarl, “A fella’s gotta eat!”

Such posturing and pompous clowns who have been defeated and hollowed out by a world weary cynicism will then point to the grim gates of the abattoir and demand, “You hypocrites! What do you think goes on in those there cathedrals of slaughter and death?”

True enough. The meat industry in the West can be an ugly and barbaric thing. But there’s always a difference between bad and worse. And the gaping abyss which exists between the humane slaughter of livestock which has been bred for a specific reason, and the boiling alive of a fellow predator, and an animal, which in every sense of the word has long been regarded as man’s best friend, is not one any sane person who values the natural order of things and the sanctity of life should ever attempt to bridge.

If for whatever reason you live in a country where the only food available is dog. And let’s be honest, that’s a big, perhaps nonexistent “if,” why not show a degree of mercy upon the poor animal and snap its neck before it’s placed in the pot?

To do otherwise suggests a sadistic savagery, that yes, becomes the business of the whole world to interfere and say, “Enough! You’re sick, we’re angry, and you’re being asked to account for your actions.”

Stop this please barbaric act sign petition please. http://www.fightdogmeat.com/petitions/