Thai Navy Heroes Rescue 800 Dogs Being Smuggled to Vietnam for the Dinner Table

Image from a video taken in August of a similar smuggling from Thailand to Vietnam. If you want to see the video - and only do so if you can handle disturbing material - you can click on the second Huffington Post link below. But I don't advise it unless you are pretty steeled to this kind of thing, which is why I am not inserting the link in a more traditional way.

The Thai Navy rescued some 800 dogs from ending up on dinner tables in Vietnam when it aborted a smuggling operation this morning on the shores of the Mekong River in Nakhon Phanom province.

The dogs were on a truck, crammed into small, rusty cages that were about to be loaded onto a boat that would ferry them across the river to Laos. From there, they were destined for Vietnam, to be sold in the dog-meat market.

The dogs will be sent to a shelter, where their fate could at least not be worse than it would have been. There is no word of what will become of them in the shelter – whether people will flock to adopt them or if they are just going to be put down humanely (as opposed to the horrendous ways they would be slaughtered for food; I will not go into it here.) or something in between.

Thai authorities last year stopped the transport of more than 2,000 dogs bound for Vietnam in similarly horrendous conditions. These dogs are often rounded up as strays, or bartered for in rural areas. In last year’s raid, dozens of dogs had died of suffocation in their cramped cages when Thai police found them. Two Thai men were charged with the illegal transportation and trafficking of animals. They could face a year in jail and a fine of about $600.

Sadly, the Navy rescuers found only 40 cages with dogs today, and have been able to detain only one man. They also found 100 empty cages, meaning some 2,000 dogs may already have been smuggled in this most recent operation.

It is encouraging to see the Thai government going after traffickers like this. Maybe with stiffer penalties these smugglers would find something else to do that doesn’t involve dogs. And perhaps the government will step it up when they see the positive international reaction to their efforts.

Sources: Sky News, MSN News, Huffington Post, Washington Post, Huffington Post (2)

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Dog: It’s What Was for Dinner in Texas 9,400 Years Ago

The oldest domesticated dog in the Americas was probably very similar to this modern-day Peruvian dog, say scientists

The partial skullbone of a dog much like the Peruvian breed above wound up in somebody’s dinner in Texas 9,400 years ago, according to new research. Scientists recently found the bone and identified it as being part of the oldest domesticated dog yet found in the Americas.

“Not only were (dogs) most likely companions as they are today, they served as protection, hunting assistants, and also as a food source,” said bone discoverer Samuel Belknap III, a University of Maine researcher in the Department of Anthropology and Climate Change Institute.

Belknap didn’t set out to find the oldest dog in the New World. That was just a lucky fluke he discovered when examining someone’s fossilized waste. (Yum!)

“I started out trying to understand human diet in southwest Texas. It so happens that this person, who lived 9,400 years ago, was eating dog,” Belknap said in a press release.

He surmises that dogs were eaten in times of desperation or celebration, according to an interesting article in Discovery. If you want to know more, check it out. It’s worth a little visit if you’re interested in dog history.

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