Disturbing videos of dogs being covered in boiling water and barbecued alive show the grim reality of China’s gruesome and unsanitary dog meat markets.
Campaigners have shared grizzly pictures and video as they prepare to march on the country’s embassy in London and demanding an end to the industry.
Throughout the year the dogs are stuffed in tiny cages close to other animals and are skinned alive and slaughtered on site with no regard to sanitation.
Graphic footage which Metro.co.uk has decided not to publish shows a dog still barking and opening its bloody jaw as it is barbecued alive.
Provider: No to Dog Meat
Two men at the market can be heard chatting and laughing as the tortured creature flinches over the grill.
Another video taken in China’s Hubei province shows boiling water being poured over a bloody and half shaven dog before it cries out in agony and limps across the concrete floor.
Despite the bludgeoning, stabbing, poisoning and suffocating of dogs being well documented across the country, the animal’s meat is still in high demand in some regions.
Roughly 10 million dogs and four million cats are slaughtered every year in the People’s Republic, having been stolen from back yards, crammed into cages on the back of lorries and driven for days with no food or water.
According to Humane Society International, only 20 per cent of China’s population regularly eats dog and only 65 per cent have tried it.
The group says the vast majority of demand comes from the country’s southern, central and northeast region.
Since 2012 No to Dog Meat have been documenting the cruel treatment of these defenceless animals, but China’s coronavirus epidemic has presented an opportunity to make new cases for ending the trade.
Its activists warn the disease is rife in dog meat markets and are urging the People’s Republic to take immediate action.
They have launched a petition calling for an immediate end to the markets where dogs are knifed, bludgeoned and burnt to death, surrounded by thousands of customers and other animals.
A message from the group says: ‘Your food markets have no control over sanitation and nor do the majority of your restaurants.
‘It is time to end the live slaughter and abject cruelty to dogs and cats in your markets (including Wuhan). It is time to end the illegal trade of dogs and cats for food and fur.’
The charity’s CEO Julia De Cadent told Metro.co.uk: ‘We want to push China’s authorities to say public slaughter of all animals has to stop.’
She says she has personally witnessed horrific mutilation of monkeys, rats turtles and a number of species, but that dogs ‘in particular are treated worse’.
The activist added: ‘When they skin them for fur, they will skin them alive and burn the fur off and then they will throw the carcass of the living animal down so that pigs can gorge upon it.’
Sometimes the skinned animals are left on the floor to slowly die before being turned into wither animal feed or food for humans.
Julia said: ‘Because it’s an undercover type of industry, obviously they are slaughtered and sold in plain site, the funds that are raised do go back into the black market and therefore there’s a criminality to it as well.’
While dogs are often farmed for food and fur in countries including South Korea, in China they are almost always stolen as pets or snatched off the streets as strays.
Julia says many of the animals will not have vaccinations and the un-regulated nature of the business means its impossible to maintain a consistent level of hygiene.
She say many dogs rescued by her charity from the Wuhan and Yulin regions have presented with respiratory coronavirus, which scientists have said can pass to humans.
The campaigner added: ‘Morals aside, ethics aside just take the basic facts of dogs and cats being kept in filthy conditions with faeces and urine around, next to poultry, next to seafood, all different species and then publicly slaughtered. There is cross-contamination.’
Julia, from central London, is keen to stress that the ‘horror show’ industry is not just something people in the west are concerned about.
Her charity works with locals on the ground with whom they run a shelter housing over 450 dogs.
Some of them are ready to be adopted but will have to stay where they are for the foreseeable future to make sure they do not post a contamination risk or are confiscated by authorities.
Julia: ‘We are not pointing the finger at home and running an anti-Asia campaign, that’s definitely not what we’re doing.
‘The problem in China is they don’t have Facebook, they don’t have Twitter, they don’t have YouTube.
‘One of our volunteers has recently had her phone confiscated. Her work discovered that she had a VPN and she was posting on Twitter about some dogs that needed to be adopted.’
She said a couple of years ago two students who helped the charity save some dogs during Yulin’s annual festival were arrested by authorities, one of whom they’ve heard nothing from since.
Julia added: ‘They don’t have the means to speak out as we do, and you think “oh well they’re living there they can find out what’s happening” well I can tell you it’s really hard even when you’re in China what’s happening everywhere. You’re not allowed to speak out.’
Click here to sign No to Dog Meat’s petition.
