The article first appeared in the Herald Sun, Melbourne, Australia, on Saturday, June 10, 2006. Little has changed. Please support this worthy cause. Thank you.

These dogs await their horrifying end at a Chinese market. Please lobby to end the dog meat and fur trade in China. Take action by contacting and supporting the WSPA: World Society for the Protection of Animals, Animals Asia Foundation (AFF), The Humane Society of the United States, The Humane Society International, and local concerned animal protection and welfare groups and citizens within your own local area.

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Terror: dogs stuffed into a cage (upper) and a St Bernard (lower) await their horrifying end at a Guangzhou market. It’s a practice Prof Song Wei (lower left) hopes will end soon.

Serving up pet food (but it’s not for the dogs)

It’s the Year of the Dog, but that won’t save millions of canines from being served for dinner, as Angela Leary writes-

Maoshan Animal Market, Guangzhou, southern China

The dogs at Maoshan Animal Market huddle as one at the back of their enclosures. In one filthy cage, more than 100 crush together in wretchedness. It’s a humid spring morning, not cold, but many are shivering. It’s a different kind of warmth they are seeking. One by one, these trembling animals will be dragged out and slowly bludgeoned to death, while their terrified pack mates look on, cowering and whimpering, wondering which one will be next.

The market, on the outskirts of China’s bustling southern city of Guangzhou, supplies the surrounding restaurants with dog meat, a specialty dish favoured by well off provincials.

The locals believe the meat will taste better if, at the moment of death, the dogs are panic- stricken, electric with adrenalin.

So their death comes slowly. First a heavy blow to the snout with a rough-hewn truncheon resembling a baseball bat, then the dogs are left to absorb their pain for a minute or so, their cries curdling the blood of the other dogs in line.
Often they stagger up to their tormentors, tails feebly wagging, in the hope of a reprieve. But there’s no mercy here. The beating continues at a torturous pace until the dogs, in and out of consciousness, finally succumb to the blows.

Such is a dog’s life as the people celebrate the Year of the Dog.

Animals Asia Foundation, based in Hong Kong, is determined to make use of this auspicious year in the Chinese zodiac to push for a ban on dog meat.

Founder and CEO Jill Robinson says millions of dogs are brutally slaughtered in China each year. Most are deliberately tortured.

Other killing methods include electrocution and hanging. Some are boiled alive.”It’s absolutely heartbreaking,” Robinson says.

“Before they arrive at the markets, these dogs often spend three or four days on the back of trucks, crammed together in tiny cages. They get nothing to eat and they don’t even have access to water. If they’re lucky, they will be hosed down just to keep them alive. “

Robinson denies accusations of cultural imperialism from Westerners who say that for the Chinese, consumption of dog and cat meat is the same as eating lamb or beef.

“There is a very big difference. Herd animals have evolved to adapt better to live in groups, and farm animals in general have been genetically selected to adapt better to captivity and farming practices,” she says.

“We certainly don’t want to imply that livestock animals don’t suffer – they do – but dogs are carnivores and pack animals. Hierarchy is important. In markets, crammed into cages, the competition for food, females in season and the stress of seeing other dogs slaughtered leads to aggression and fighting.”

Disease is also rife among market dogs, Robinson says.

Sadly this is just one of the injustices for dogs in China.

Pedigrees are routinely tossed out of middle-class homes as new breeds become fashionable.

Starving strays are common on the streets and authorities have no interest in humane euthanasia.

Culling days are routine in southern provinces when bands of municipal workers take to the streets to bludgeon dogs – strays and pets – to death, sometimes in full view of their horrified owners.

Robinson, a Briton, who has been awarded an MBE for her work in animal welfare is seeping into the Chinese psyche.

“I feel the momentum for change is building and the great thing is that it’s coming from within China,” she says.

AAF has launched a China-wide campaign called “Friends or Food?” to tackle the problems of cruelty and neglect and specifically to end dog and cat eating.

Robinson has reason to be optimistic. Her group recently hosted the first China Companion Animal Symposium in Guangzhou and 32 animal welfare groups, representing about 250,000 people from around China, voted unanimously to push for a ban on the consumption of dog and cat meat.

“Imagine this forum happening 10 or five years ago. It simply would not have been possible,” she says.

The most obvious hurdle facing animal activists is the dearth of legal protection for companion animals in China. There is none.

Prof Song Wei, a lecturer in law at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, Anhui province, says the country’s legal structure is so complex and vast that the most effective way to tackle the problem is to amend existing legislation at the local level.

Such laws focus on controlling animals and limiting numbers, but ignore welfare.

“Along with legislation we need to see a shift in attitudes and a change in our culture,” Prof Wei says.
“We must combine a loving heart with the law.
“There has been much progress even in the past five years. Abuse cases today always spark huge public outrage. There is much more awareness of animal welfare.”

A new generation of Chinese are leading the charge, says young and urbane Li Yunjun.

Li started Private Pet Home in Panyu, just south of Guangzhou three years ago.
His organisation rescues strays, but focuses on education.

“My parents eat dog and cat meat even though they know about the cruelty,” Li says.
“They do not accept what I do. They don’t understand why I should care about animals.”

But Li says very few young, urban people would eat dog and cat meat now, as “they see it as ugly and unacceptable”.

The practice is more common in the countryside, where men boast about the amount of dog meat they can consume in one sitting.

Li says he is optimistic the practice will eventually die out, but it will have to be driven by a change in attitudes, not just laws.
“Corruption is still a huge problem,” he says.
“Laws would help, but those that want to keep the industry going just need to pay money.”

Guangzhou native Christie Yang Min says that the change, while slow, is unstoppable.
Yang, who co-ordinates AAF’s China PR efforts, says the internet is a major factor in spreading the word and allowing animal welfare groups to offer mutual support.
“Co-operation is really important for any group working in a country as big as China,” she says.

Even in cosmopolitan Hong Kong, ignorance is widespread.
“At first I was shocked,” says Briton, Anneleise Smillie, AAF’s education director.

“Many children genuinely believe dogs have no feelings, that they are incapable of feeling emotions or even physical pain.”

She describes a recent exchange with children at a middle-range school.
“Can Mao Mao feel sad?”
“Noooooo!”
“Can Mao Mao feel happy?”
“Noooooo!” the children chant again, giggling at the absurdity of the notion.

Mao Mao is a golden retriever on one of his first outings with “Professor Paws”, a programme run by AAF to encourage in Chinese children a lifelong respect for dogs — and to rid them of their crippling fear and misunderstanding.

Under a program run by AAF, native English-speaking volunteers take their dogs into schools to give children the chance to chat in English and to pat the dogs.

Often it is the first time they will have touched a dog.

AAF executive director Annie Mather says it is often ignorance rather than deliberate cruelty that leads to the mistreatment of dogs.
“Many Hong Kong people take their dogs for walks by carrying them because they don’t want them to get their feet dirty and make a mess in their flats,” Mather says.

“They don’t realise that dogs need exercise.”

“One woman in Mainland China, who adored her little dog, washed it every day in dishwashing liquid. She really thought she was doing the right thing and couldn’t understand why it was losing its fur.”

It is in mainland China that the biggest challenges remain. Wu Jun of the Zhuhai Animal Protection Association in Guangdong province, says it is time he shared a shameful secret to illustrate the extent of ignorance that he and others fighting to end cruelty are facing.

“My wife and I once went to a restaurant and saw meat being sliced off the animals while they were still alive,” Wu says, struggling to continue. “I have not been able to tell this to a foreigner before. Dogs and cats can’t speak, but we can. So we must speak out even louder.

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Dogs In Asia

www.DogsInAsia.com

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Click on image to go to the DOGS IN ASIA site. Please be warned that the video clip and some links from the site are distressing in the extreme, but they exist to spread awareness of the grisly fate that can await dogs ( and cats ) in some Asian countries. The site’s aim is to educate, and to alert breeders to what is going on and hopefully prevent further exports to such places. Also to raise awareness among the buying public. What price fur for fur trim?… The answer to the “How many” question is 42.

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Animal Cruelty

http://www.buyhard.fsnet.co.uk/animalcruelty.htm

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Blog Updated September 6, 2007

HSUS >> About Us >> Humane Society International (HSI) >> Animal Cruelty Issues from Around the World

Dying for Fur: Recent Investigation Shows Cruelty at Chinese Fur Farms

China’s Fur Farms

Imagine buying a child’s toy or a piece of furniture, never realizing you are actually buying a product containing fur from a Chinese fur farm—fur that was once a terrified Arctic fox, held in a wire cage, abused, and eventually skinned alive.

Eighty-five percent of the world’s fur comes from fur farms. China has become the world’s largest exporter of fur, largely due to the country’s absence of animal welfare protection and surplus of cheap labor.

Demand for fur from China, mostly from Europe and the United States, has grown in the last ten years—the result of heavy investment in marketing campaigns by a global fur industry aiming to make fur more socially acceptable. The fur industry has also developed a wider range for fur products in international commercial markets—products with smaller price tags and less obvious connections to the furry faces that have caused them so much trouble over the years.

The Investigation: What They Witnessed

The rapid growth in fur farming and lack of animal welfare regulation in China prompted Care for the Wild, EAST International and the Swiss Animal Protection (SAP) to collaborate on an investigation throughout 2004 and January of 2005. The investigation, Fun Fur? A Report on the Chinese Fur Industry, exposes the horrors inflicted on animals at Chinese fur farms.Investigators for the Fun Fur? report obtained photos and video at fur farms throughout the Hebei province of Eastern China. Visited farms each held between 50 and 6,000 frightened and abused animals. Investigators documented Red foxes, Arctic foxes, raccoon dogs, minks, and rex rabbits manifesting pathological behaviors, high cub mortality rates and infanticide—symptoms of a lifetime of abuse. They tracked the animals as they were transported for sale under brutal conditions, and were skinned, often alive, adjacent to the wholesale markets where pelts are sold between the months of November and March.

China’s lack of animal welfare standards allows millions of animals to live out their entire lives cramped in rows of tiny wire cages. These caged animals pace, nod, and circle their heads repeatedly in signs of extreme anxiety. Others, overwhelmed by the conditions, develop learned helplessness, huddling in their cages and demonstrating no signs of interest in the activity around them.

Before sale at markets, animals are removed from cages with metal tongs around their necks and carried by their hind legs for skinning and slaughter. Instead of killing the animals humanely, workers often stun them with repeated blows to the head using wooden clubs, or by swinging them by the hind legs and beating their heads on the ground.

Investigators witnessed a significant number of animals that were still alive when the skinning process began—starting with a knife at the rear of the belly and ending with the fur being pulled over the animal’s head. After the skin was removed, investigators taped animals being thrown on a pile of other carcasses. These animals were still breathing, had a heartbeat, and continued moving and blinking for between five to ten minutes after their skin had been ripped from their bodies.

The success of fur industry campaigns and new manufacturing methods to make fur socially acceptable encourages the continued cruelty at Chinese fur farms and around the world. Fun Fur? reports that; “Many shoppers, who might flinch at buying a full-length fur coat, might still be seduced by a coat with a fur collar, a parka with fur trim around the hood, a scarf, or wrap, or a handbag with fur detail. &The animal connection may be less apparent with fur that has been shaved, knitted or dyed, or combined with other materials.”

Shop Smarter

Some consumers may never suspect that they are buying fur. Items as inconspicuous as children’s toys and furniture made with fur are turning up in stores. And these products are not always labeled. Each of these items—the trim on a coat, the lining of a glove or a child’s toy—represents the cruelty in the life and death of an animal farmed for its fur.

Become an educated, active consumer and help end the suffering of animals on Chinese fur farms. Avoid any product with fur trim. Manufacturing techniques like dying often fool shoppers into thinking they are buying fake fur. Ask store managers if they know how their fur products are labeled and where the fur comes from. You can make them aware of the cruelty on Chinese fur farms and the blood trail behind the products they sell.

Take Action

Appeal to the source—let the Chinese government know that allowing the continued suffering of animals for fur is unacceptable in light of China’s international standing.
Write To:

Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong
2300 Connecticut Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20008

Minister Bo Xilai
No.2 Dong Chang’an Avenue
Beijing, China 100731

Write a letter to both the Chinese Minister of Commerce and the Chinese Ambassador to the United States. Express your concerns and urge them to recognize that the inhumane treatment of animals on Chinese fur farms shows a lack of understanding of acceptable animal husbandry techniques. As the largest exporter of fur, and the biggest fur trade production and processing country in the world, China has the opportunity to make an enormous, positive impact on the lives of millions of animals.

WARNING – Disturbing Images In January 2005, Care for the Wild, EAST International and the Swiss Animal Protection released their wrenching findings from Fun Fur? A Report on the Chinese Fur Industry. The report and video investigators released show extremely graphic images that some people may find distressing.

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Resources: (click on the links below)

Animals Asia Foundation

Asian Animal Protection Network AAPN

Dogs In Asia

http://www.buyhard.fsnet.co.uk/animalcruelty.htm

Humane Society International

Swiss Animal Protection (SAP)

WSPA: World Society for the Protection of Animals

Dog Eating/Cruelty in the Philippines