
Because Australian tourists are the REAL victims here! There is a strong focus on Australian tourists being “duped” in the campaign against dog meat in Bali.
You can listen to this episode above and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes. You can also listen to this episode on Stitcher, Cyber Ears or download it on Archive.org (70mins, 59MB).
This episode covers the Bali dog meat scandal, where Australian tourists have been eating dogs thinking they were eating a different species of animal. To discuss this, Nick is joined by his cousin Emil Raji, who has lived in Bali for most of his life. We give a critical perspective on this scandal and the campaign against it, highlighting the nationalism and racism underlying the outrage behind eating dogs as particularly exceptional or worse than eating other animals.
We play Nick’s talk ‘Rescuing Dogs in a Mercedes-Benz: Animal Advocacy in China’. This talk gives a critical perspective on Western opposition to the dog meat trade. You can view the PowerPoint for this talk here and it is also embedded above. This talk is from the most recent TASA (The Australian Sociological Association) conference. You can listen to other talks from this conference here and you can hear our recap of this conference on episode 151.
We also play Colin Salter’s talk ‘Normativity, Intersectionality and States of Exception’, which argues that animal advocates shouldn’t focus on the relatively small number of animals killed in non-Western counties as exceptional but instead address the far more widespread animal slaughter in Western countries. This talk was recorded at the most recent Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS) Oceania conference. You can hear a recap of this conference on episode 152 and there are links to audio of all of the talks from it in the show notes of that episode. Also a reminder about the upcoming ICAS Oceania conference (14-16 July) and the Development for Species – Animals in society, animals as society conference (18-19 September). They are both in Melbourne.

I spotted this at the vet. On the episode I mentioned that it was the ‘Fuck Off We’re Full’ sticker but it was actually a different racist sticker alongside the Sea Shepherd sticker – same problem though – do animal campaigns feed into racist attitudes?
Other stuff covered on this episode is: the thousands of dogs killed in Australia each year, using the website/app happycow.net to help with vegan eating in Bali and all around the world, nationalism and racism in the campaign against live export – for more on this, check out episode 97 (also featuring Emil) and Nick’s talk ‘Live Animal Export, Humane Slaughter And Media Hegemony’.
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Clips:
Madness on tha Block ‘Ironi’, Nick’s talk ‘Rescuing Dogs in a Mercedes-Benz: Animal Advocacy in China’, Colin Salter’s talk ‘Normativity, Intersectionality and States of Exception’, Ugly Bastard ‘Menuju Pulau Seribu Luka’.
Check out Emil’s photography on Instagram!