Chinese dogs rescued ahead of barbaric festival
Print Edition
DOZENS of terrified dogs and cats have been rescued from a slaughterhouse in Yulin, southern China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, just days ahead of the annual dog meat festival on Tuesday.
The animals, 34 dogs, puppies and kittens, were being held in squalid conditions at a slaughter facility in Yulin when Chinese activists, led by Humane Society International, arrived and negotiated the release of all the animals inside. Some of the dogs were wearing collars, suggesting these are pets stolen by dog thieves to fuel the trade, an increasingly common crime across China.
“It was heart breaking when I approached their filthy enclosure. They came to me hopefully and one of them followed my fingers with his nose,” HSI’s Peter Li told Shanghai Daily. “Like so many others, he (the dog) had probably been a household pet and was stolen from his family for this meat trade.”
The local government in Yulin banned the decades-old tradition last year after 2 million furious campaigners in China called for an end to the barbaric practice. However, mass dog slaughter is still going on in Yulin, according to animal rights activists.
“We saw hundreds of newly- slaughtered dogs impaled on spikes and cats crammed so tightly into tiny wire cages waiting to be slaughtered. They were suffering from long journeys, food deprivation, mental trauma and illnesses. Some of them wore collars,” Li said.
Posing as a local merchant, Li also found that local slaughterhouse workers were instructed to only kill animals under the cover of darkness and restaurants were told to remove the words “dog meat” from their menus in an attempt to cover up the festival’s existence.
Li said he was alarmed at the dangerously unhygienic conditions in which the animals were being killed and described the smell at a slaughterhouse just outside Dongkou — where the “end of slaughter process” takes place — as “offensive.”
“The place was full of blood, internal organs of the dogs and cats, blow torched carcasses, and freshly slaughtered dogs hanging on hooks,” he added.
But he claims the dog meat trade is on the decline and at this time of year — when the trade is at its busiest — he only saw two open stores in the infamous Dongkou Market.
China has no law protecting the welfare of pets but the Ministry of Agriculture has strict rules which require cats and dogs to have “health certificates” before they are transported. The mass-transport of animals over long distances increases the risk of rabies and threatens the health and safety of the people who eat them.
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