Recently, footage emerged showing a German shepherd’s eyes watering as its owner orders it to eat a dish made with red chilies.

Underneath the video, the owner wrote: “He is enjoying it very much.”

The video seems to have emerged as a disturbing offshoot of the “mukbang” trend.

Mukbang videos are a relatively new phenomenon where a host (usually a video creator or live streamer) sits in front of a camera and interacts with their audience while eating an absurdly large amount of food.

The term mukbang loosely translates to “eating broadcast.”

While the mukbang trend originated in South Korea, it has also spread to the West with YouTube featuring a wide variety of mukbang creators. Two of the most popular eaters on YouTube, Stephanie Soo and Nickocado Avocado, have nearly two million subscribers each.

As mentioned, however, mukbang originated in South Korea and is consequently also extremely popular on Asian video-sharing platforms. An article by the Global Times stated that some popular eaters can earn more than 300,000 yuan for a single eating show.

Of course, consistently eating absolutely insane amounts of food isn’t as easy as mukbangers would have us believe – and, as a result, many hosts fake the actual eating part- either by simply moving food around, purging off-camera, or editing the video to make it seem as though everything was consumed.

In August, President Xi of China enacted “Operation Empty Plate,” a campaign to crack down on food waste. However, this sickening video seems to be a result of that decision.

Since Chinese creators are no longer able to create mukbang videos, others have stepped in and started using animals as a workaround.

According to DailyMail.com, these animal videos are well-received on Chinese video-sharing websites, generally garnering thousands of likes. Other disturbing animal eating clips found on the site include a video of two dogs being forced to eat 38 different kinds of human food as part of some perverse eating challenge, as well as another showing an owner forcing popping candy down a dog’s throat and then holding its snout shut.

As more people are growing aware of these disturbing videos, animal activists have been stepping in for… well, obvious reasons.

According to DailyMail.com, comments on the video read:

“This is just a new way of abusing animals. They don’t deserve to keep pets, what a bunch of cold-blooded bastards! Poor animals, they trust their owners unconditionally yet the owners just use them as cash cows.”

“These people are so sick! They need to be censored immediately!”

“Jesus, can’t you see it’s crying? How can you film him eating chilies while watching him cry in pain?”‘

Social media users are now demanding that these videos be banned from the video platforms, calling them “too cruel to watch.”

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Sources: Metro, LadBible, DailyMail.com, Global Times