(CN) 149 dogs saved from meat market

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2009:

 

 

149 dogs saved from meat market

 

CHENGDU--The last day of 2008 brought the first known mass

seizure of dogs from meat traders in mainland China in almost 70

years. " The 149 dogs were confiscated from the trading station in

Pengzhou, 30 kilometres north of Chengdu, by the local Animal

Husbandry Bureau, after it discovered that the trader was operating

without a licence, " announced the Animals Asia Foundation.

" The officials were notified of the situation by Qiao Wei,

operator of the Qiming Rescue Centre in Chengdu, who had received a

tip-off about the dogs, " the Animals Asia Foundation release

continued.

Best known for operating the China Bear Rescue Center near

Chengdu, " Animals Asia recently built the spacious quarantine area

at the Qiming Rescue Centre to shelter dogs rescued from the May 2008

Sichuan earthquake, " the release explained.

" Most of those dogs have been adopted or reclaimed by their

families, " said Animals Asia Foundation founder Jill Robinson, " so

we have room to house these new dogs while they recover and await

adoption. The dogs were in an appalling condition, many of them

very thin and clearly in shock, " Robinson told media. " I hate to

think how long they had been in those cages, many of them packed in

so tightly that they were piled on top of each other. "

Photos showed that many of the dogs wore collars and were

possibly stolen pets, but others appeared to be street dogs.

Robinson asked families in Pengzhou whose dogs were missing

to contact the Qiming rescue centre.

The dog rescue followed a string of other incidents in which

Chinese law enforcement and state-controlled news media either

encouraged opponents of dog and cat eating or conspicuously did not

interfere with rescues and protests.

Among the most publicized was a December 18, 2008 rally by

about 40 people outside the Guangdong government's Beijing delegation

office. Said rally leader Wang Hongyao, " We are very angry because

the cats are being skinned and then cooked alive. We must make them

correct this uncivilized behavior. "

" The protest was apparently in response to Chinese media

reports that carried pictures of furry felines peering out through

bamboo crates and metal cages, apparently en route to Guangzhou,

Guang-dong's capital, " reported Gillian Wong of Associated Press.

" Other pictures showed cats being skinned in restaurant kitchens. "

Elaborated William Fore-man of Associated Press, " The

Southern Metropolis Daily--a Guangdong paper famous for exposes and

aggressive reporting--ran a story that said about 1,000 cats were

transported by train from Nanjing to Guangdong each day. Some people

in Nanjing spend their days 'fishing for cats,' often stealing pets,

the report said. "

In Guangzhau, the Guang-dong capital, animal advocates held

protests similar to the one in Beijing at the central train station,

and stormed trains trying to rescue cats.

Their efforts inspired Barbara Demick, Eliot Gao, and

Nicole Liu of the Los Angeles Times' Beijing bureau to investigate

the cat meat trade by purchasing a cat at a Guangzhau market. They

then released the cat at " A row of apartment houses next to an empty

lot, " where a women told them mice were plentiful. " Her accent

indicated that she came from northern China, and many of the people

around the neighborhood were migrant workers from outside Guangdong.

They don't eat cats. We can only hope for the best, " Demick wrote.

Previous Chinese actions of note on behalf of cats included

the September 2006 storming of a cat meat restaurant in Shenzhen by

about 50 activists; a rescue of about 415 cats by more than 100

activists who stormed a cat meat market in February 2007; and an

August 2008 episode in which six members of the Shanghai Animal

Protection Associ-ation caught up with a convoy of trucks hauling

1,500 cats to Guang-dong at Jiaxing, near Shanghai. A 15-hour

standoff followed. Police eventually allowed the truckers to leave

with about 700 cats, wrote Fei Lei of the Shanghai Daily, but only

after their condition was extensively exposed by news media and about

800 cats were allowed to escape when activists broke cages.

The Shanghai SPCA in September 1939 won convictions of two

men for misrepresenting dog meat as rabbit--a time when eating dogs

and cats appears to have been much less accepted in China and in

nearby nations than in recent times.

The Italian explorer Marco Polo noted with disgust that dogs

and cats were eaten in Guangdong circa 1350, but five pre-World War

II humane societies serving other parts of China and Korea seldom

mentioned either dog eating or cat eating occurring in their regions

in their reports to U.S. donors.

Trying to abolish dog eating was, however, a focal concern

of the Philippine SPCA from 1902 on. Closed by World War II, the

Philippine SPCA and the Hong Kong SPCA reopened almost a decade after

the fighting stopped. Wartime meat shortages had encouraged dog

eating in both the Philippines and Hong Kong.

The Philippine Animal Welfare Society, founded in 1954,

rallied international support that in 1996 helped to win passage of a

law against killing dogs for human consumption. The Philippine SPCA

remains active on the issue, housing 70 dogs who were seized from a

dog meat trader by the Quezon City police anti-car theft unit on

December 4, 2008, in response to a tip from the Network for

Animals.

The Hong Kong SPCA won a ban on killing or selling dogs for

human consumption more than 40 years ago, but efforts to fully

suppress dog eating in Hong Kong continue. The first jail sentence

for killing dogs in order to eat them was issued in June 2007. In

October 2008 the Hong Kong SPCA followed members of the Animal Life

Guard Action Group of Hong Kong to the site of a suspected dog

slaughterhouse. " About 20 group members found choppers, meat

knives, air pistol pellets, animal traps, hooks, a wok and bones

around the house, " wrote Colleen Lee of the South China Morning Post.

For more than 40 years after the war closed the Seoul and

Chosen SPCAs there was no humane society in Korea.

For more than 50 years, until the Animals Asia Foundation

began rescuing bears from bile farms in southern China, there were

no humane societies in China between Hong Kong and Beijing.

Eating cats appears to have boomed in Guangdong in the

interim, stimulated by rising affluence resulting from proximity to

Hong Kong. Also within the past 20 years eating cats began to be

reported in South Korea.

Eating dogs appears to have spread up the Chinese coast and

into both North and South Korea after World War II, and to have

spread south with Chinese military influence during the 1960s and

1970s in Vietnam and Laos.

In parts of Southeast Asia that remain staunchly Buddhist,

including the former South Vietnam, dog-eating is much less

conspicuous.

The traffic in dogs and cats for meat has been economically

boosted since the mid-1990s by the sale of items made in China with

dog and cat fur to mostly unawares buyers in the west. Effective on

January 1, 2009 the 27-nation European Union followed the U.S. and

Australia in prohibiting dog and cat fur imports, leaving Russia as

the largest remaining buyer.

" I urge the Chinese authorities to ban this trade and in

particular to close down the export of cat and dog skins to Russia, "

said Struan Stevenson, the Scottish member of the European

Parliament who authored the EU ban.

As with the U.S. and Australian legislation, the EU law may

prove hard to enforce, since dog and cat fur is typically used in

small amounts, on mislabeled items.

But the Chinese government tolerance of protests against

eating dogs and cats may signify that Beijing increasingly recognizes

the value of pets in an era of obligatory one-child families, and

may see the dog and cat meat and fur industries as more trouble than

they are worth.

Recurring rabies outbreaks in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hubei,

Hunan and Yunan provinces kill more than 3,000 people per year. The

outbreaks are officially blamed on pet-keepers failing to vaccinate,

but these are the provinces in which dogs are most often eaten and

farmed, factory-style, for human consumption. " Meat dogs " are not

vaccinated.

Responding to a July 2008 rabies outbreak in Yunnan,

officials vaccinated 84,000 pet dogs and killed 11,500 during the

next three months, said the Beijing News. Those who were killed

included street dogs, strays, and any dogs believed have been

exposed to rabies. --Merritt Clifton

 

--

Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

P.O. Box 960

Clinton, WA 98236

 

Telephone: 360-579-2505

Fax: 360-579-2575

E-mail: anmlpepl

Web: www.animalpeoplenews.org

 

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