Urge the Chinese Government to set Up Laws against Animal Cruelty

Many readers may be aware that dogs and cats are eaten in China. However, dogs and cats are not only consumed or killed for their fur, —an estimated 10 million each year, according to the Hong Kong humane group Animals Asia—they are slowly tortured, bled or beaten to death, or butchered or boiled alive, in the belief the more they suffer the better they “taste.” German shepherds have been seen being skinned alive in a frigid warehouse in Harbin. The fur is sold in Europe for use—with false labels—in clothing, e.g. on hoods of winter coats.

A humane group website, the Asian Animals Protection Network, has photographs of men thrusting knives into the necks of fully conscious dogs, then hanging them on an incline as their blood runs out. Others show people gathered at a roadside with dogs tied to a truck or railroad tracks. As man’s best friend cries out, and as the next victims look on, petrified, several men (or women) are seen holding him and another cuts his chest open and butchers him on the spot. Mangled corpses are all around.

The dogs and cats are raised on huge “farms” in extremely crowded and filthy conditions that would result in the farms being shut down for animal cruelty crimes in any civilized country. Some import giant, gentle breeds like St. Bernards, the beloved rescue dogs. These are cross- bred with local dogs to produce a fast growing “meat dog” that can be killed at four months of age. The dogs’ journey from “farm” to market is worse. Animals Asia investigators have observed trucks carrying up to 2000 dogs each arriving at a notorious market in Guangzhou. They have endured three days and nights wedged on top of each other in cages, deprived of food and water. Large numbers of dead and sick dogs and cats have been observed lying beside the cages at the market. The ones still alive are brutally lifted by the neck and flung into a pen by a man using metal tongs. Other investigators have witnessed dogs tied in nets being dumped from trucks, some crying as their feet are broken; then they are flung with the tongs into fenced areas where laughing men bludgeon them just for kicks. Cats are slowly bled to death on curbs as the expectant diners look on.

China is not alone. Though human eating of dog and cat meat has been outlawed in some Asian countries, such as Taiwan and the Philippines (not cats), as well as Hong Kong, South Korea is on the same beastly level as China. According to the Korea Animal Protection Society, millions of dogs and hundreds of thousands of cats each year are tortured to death for a dog-stew or a cat juice that many believe offer mythical health benefits—provided the victims suffer enough.

Dogs are strangled to death, often from trees, for up to an hour, or bludgeoned to death with pipes or hammers, then blowtorched. Cats are boiled alive or beaten to death in sacks pounded into the ground.