Win Against Dog Traders in China

Animal Welfare Advocates Notch a Win Against Dog Traders
By BECKY DAVIS August 7, 2014 6:00 pmAugust 8, 2014 4:38 am
Photo

Animal welfare advocates climbed on top of dog cages on a truck, bringing food and water to the animals and disposing of those that had died.Credit Susan Wang

It’s rare that stories of grass-roots activism in China end well, yet that seems to be the case for a group of animal lovers who rescued some 2,400 dogs that might have otherwise ended up on the menu.
On Sunday, animal rights advocates affiliated with the Care for Stray Animals Center in Beijing spotted a truck loaded with more than 400 dogs on the Beijing-Harbin Expressway. Tailing the vehicle as it drove north, they live-blogged their location over Chinese social media, calling on the local traffic police and like-minded volunteers to help stop the truck.

People in China have traditionally consumed certain kinds of dogs bred especially for their meat, but as pets become increasingly popular among urban residents, dog traders have begun to scour cities in search of strays or unattended animals to add to their hauls.

According to the volunteers, the truck intercepted on Sunday contained a large number of purebred dogs, among them golden retrievers, huskies and toy poodles, that were immediately identifiable as pets, not just the more ordinary dogs that breeders raise on farms for their meat.

Susan Wang, a member of the Care for Stray Animals Center who rushed to the scene, said the large number of purebreds suggested that the cargo had been illegally procured. “A lot of them even still had collars around their necks,” she said.

As the number of cars following the truck grew, the local police eventually stopped the vehicle at a service station outside Tangshan, a city 100 miles east of Beijing. According to The Beijing Morning Post, the truck’s final destination was Jilin, a province of harsh winters in China’s far northeast where dog meat — prized for the warming properties attributed to it by traditional Chinese medicine — is especially popular.

Though not illegal, the consumption of dog meat has become less socially acceptable among many Chinese, especially the young and educated. In 2011, public opposition forced officials in the coastal province of Zhejiang to cancel the Jinhua Hutou Dog Meat Festival, a 600-year-old tradition. Under Chinese law, however, animals that are transported must be certified as vaccinated for rabies or other diseases.

When examined by the local authorities, the dog traders were found to have falsified the paperwork — which even so covered only 110 of the 400 dogs crammed into the cages, according to the volunteers.

According to a woman who first spotted the truck and then led negotiations with local officials over how to handle its cargo, the officials were at first unwilling to hand over the dogs to the volunteers. Either the truck would have to return to its point of origin, the officials said, or continue to its destination, where the situation would be resolved.

Seeing that a crowd had gathered at the scene and sensing her leverage, however, the woman, who gave her name only as Xiuxiu, told the officials that the flock of people would not disperse until they agreed to confiscate all the dogs and hand them over to the volunteers.

Xiuxiu was granted 48 hours to deal with the situation. “I knew how many people there were outside and still on their way,” she said by telephone. “As long as we worked together, I knew we could make it happen.” Volunteers immediately began to distribute food, water and medicine to the dogs.

Then things got slightly more complicated. On Monday, other volunteers en route to the scene spotted four more trucks carrying more than 2,000 dogs on the same highway. Microblog messages were sent out, and cars filled with volunteers headed out and were able to surround the trucks, preventing their escape.

When the Tangshan police and the health authorities arrived, they again determined that the dog traders were illegally transporting the animals and asked the volunteers to provide the dogs temporary shelter at an abandoned chicken farm in the nearby city of Qianan.

Under heavy rain, volunteers began the difficult task of removing hundreds of dogs from their cages — some of them seriously ill — and caring for their immediate needs while trying to find them shelters. By Monday afternoon, thousands of people from as far away as Inner Mongolia and Qingdao who had heard about the incident through social media showed up to help with the rescue efforts or to adopt pets themselves.

Photo

Rescued dogs at a farm in Qianan surrounded by food and medical supplies brought by volunteers.Credit Susan Wang

Some came with steamed buns for the dogs, while others recited Buddhist rites for the ones that had died. Meanwhile, a group of the volunteers was enlisted to prevent local villagers from stealing dogs to eat or sell.

A number of people were able to recover their own lost pets. One woman was reunited with her brown poodle after spotting the dog, Nini, in a photo posted on social media. “Our whole family was so excited. We drove without hesitation,” she told The Beijing Morning Post.

As of Thursday, all but 30 of the dogs had been adopted or sent to temporary homes and shelters. The local police cordoned off the chicken farm from the crowds of volunteers whose services were no longer needed.

While some volunteers voiced concern about the dogs still left behind, others praised the local government’s promise to help by disposing of trash and the remaining corpses at the farm. On Thursday evening, China Central Television, the state broadcaster, reported that three veterinarians who supplied false health certificates to the dog traders would lose their licenses.

It is not the first time grass-roots efforts have saved dogs from an unhappy fate, but in previous confrontations with dog traders, the activists had usually been forced to purchase the dogs to set them free. In 2011, activists who intercepted a truck carrying 500 dogs on the same highway had to pay the driver the equivalent of $18,000.

Although China has no animal anticruelty laws, the government is increasingly tolerant of animal rights activism, not seeing it as a political threat.

Deborah Cao, an expert on animal rights law at Griffith University in Australia, credited the state media for publishing news stories that drew attention to the issue of animal protection.

“With animal activism, people are showing concern and care for other forms of life — compassion and kindness toward others that Chinese society is lacking at the moment,” she said in a phone interview. “This Chinese grass-roots animal protection movement, as I call it, is social progress for China.”

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/07/animal-activists-notch-a-win-against-dog-traders/