British stars speak out against dog-meat trade's cruelty

Thailand’s Soi Dog Foundation has some of the biggest stars in Britain speaking out against the dog-meat trade in a video that starts with a warning about its “distressing” content.
Dame Judi Dench, Ricky Gervais and two of the stars of the international-hit series “Downton Abbey” – Laura Carmichael and Phyllis Logan – give voice to the “I Never Knew” campaign in the moving (and, yes, distressing) three-minute video that drives home what you probably didn’t want to know. But of course you should know.
“I didn’t know that these innocent creatures are crammed into cages so brutally that their bones almost break, so tightly that they can’t move, and that they’re trapped like this for the smuggled journey, which can take days,” declaims Dench, the acclaimed star of stage and screen. Meanwhile you see footage of a truck loaded with dogs presumably on its way to the slaughter grounds.
“Many of them are stolen pets,” explains Gervais, the comedian turned actor who hosted the Oscars a couple of years back. A lot of the pooches don’t make it, of course, crushed, suffocated or dying of hunger and thirst along the way.
We’ve all winced at Western jokes about dog meat being on the menu in Thailand, knowing it’s only eaten in far-flung places on the Northeast frontier, or else the mutts are scooped up for Vietnamese consumption. So we don’t do anything about it. The Soi Dog Foundation wants us to do something.
“I didn’t know about this unimaginable cruelty, and neither does the majority of people in Thailand,” says Gervais. He notes that many of the dogs do get rescued and that shelters exist for them in the Northeast, but the government offers no funding, so the money can only come through donations to SoiDog.org.
The foundation has initiated a petition asking the government to halt the dog-meat trade and so far it’s drawn 423,000 signatures. Head to the website and add your name – and you might also like to adopt a rescued pooch while you’re there.
To see the video, go to YouTube and punch “gerA3kWXEz4” or “luSggyByBMQ” into the search line.

Mariah’s ready to soar

American R&B diva Mariah Carey flew into Don Muang Airport on Tuesday night, well in advance of her big concert tonight at Impact Arena. Waiting for her was a mob of banner-waving fans and a bunch of other Mariah Careys – in the form of life-size cardboard cut-outs. The real, actual Mariah stopped to say hi and pose for pictures.
There’s been a tiny bit of concern generated by social-media grumbling a few weeks ago that she wasn’t singing well on the current “Elusive Chanteuse” tour. Fans in Tokyo complained on Twitter that she couldn’t hit all the notes – understandable enough, we think, considering that she’s not as young as she used to be and that some of those notes are on the outer edge of the galaxy. There was also muttering about her occasionally forgetting the lyrics.
Bangkok doesn’t seem to care at all. Fans here are confident the show is going to be a supersonic blast. Tickets sold out within a day of her tweeting confirmation on September 3 that she’d decided to add a Bangkok date. And anyway, reports from her subsequent appearances have been getting better and better following what was apparently a rough start. The reviews from Singapore sound great. “You could dance ’til you dropped,” says a Thai journalist who was there.