Nearly 600 Dogs Rescued in China on Way to Slaughter for Food

A man spotted a truckload of 580 whimpering dogs crammed together on a Beijing highway, speeding toward their slaughter for their meat. He put a call out on a Twitter-like microblogging site, asking animal lovers to block the truck and force the driver to release the dogs.

Keep in mind that this is China, where activism in general can bring brutal consequences, and where there are few if any animal protection laws except for wild animals. In addition, dogs are still routinely on the menu at many homes and restaurants. So to even make such a request to save these dogs seemed almost hopeless.

But the man put out the call nonetheless, and 200 people responded immediately. They didn’t simply show up with picket signs or come to a shelter to adopt the animals. They drove their cars and physically blocked the truck after it passed through a tollbooth. The blockade lasted 15 hours, and in the end, they negotiated the dogs’ release for $17,000 — mostly contributed by a pet company and an animal protection foundation. Amazingly, no one was arrested.

Rescuers open the back of the truck and prepare to save the hundreds of dogs. (AP Photo/Capital Animals Welfare Association)

According to an AP article, many of the dogs were dehydrated, injured, and suffering from the potentially deadly parvovirus. At least 68 have been hospitalized. The dogs’ rescuers suspect that many of them were stolen.

Dozens of volunteers are working around the clock at the animal hospital that took in the sick dogs. Many others are tending to the healthier dogs at a property run by the Capital Animal Welfare Association on the northern outskirts of Beijing.

“When I saw the poor dogs on Twitter, I cried and cried, but I thought there was no way they could stop the truck. So I was very surprised when they did it and I wanted to help,” Chen Yang, 30, who was helping a dog who had given birth to four puppies just after the rescue, said in the AP article.

The blockade and the outpouring of volunteers is a hopeful indication that animal rights are starting to take hold in China, where age-old traditions are coming under fire as the country becomes more affluent and people see dogs more as pets than as meat.

Some of the healthier dogs after the rescue. It's not an ideal setting, but it's a far sight better than what they had. Volunteers are tending to the dogs and hoping to get them adopted to loving homes. (AP Photo/Capital Animals Welfare Association)

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Outrage growing over sled dog slaughter

On Monday, Canadian radio station CKNW discovered and reported on details of the gruesome killing of around 100 sled dogs by the manager of Outdoor Adventures Whistler in British Columbia.

The descriptions are graphic and upsetting, and I’ve wrestled with how much to share here. I’ve chosen to give you links instead of quoting the most disturbing material, because it’s taken me more than 6 hours to write this post — I  keep having to stop and get a grip on myself. Please click with caution.

Outdoor Adventures Whistler claimed through spokesperson Graham Aldcroft that they had no idea their employee, identified as Robert T. Fawcett, was going to gun the dogs down in such a brutal fashion. They thought they’d be “euthanized” in a humane manner if no homes could be found for them.

Fawcett did attempt to get a veterinarian to kill the dogs by injection, but the vet he asked refused to kill a hundred perfectly healthy dogs. Fawcett  also stated some attempt was made to find new homes for the dogs, but without success.

All this came to light because Fawcett filed a workers compensation claim with local authorities for post-traumatic stress symptoms related to the killings. From the Montreal Gazette:

In a Dec. 27, 2010, posting on a website forum for trauma sufferers, a Whistler resident named Bob Fawcett, an award-winning dogsledder, wrote: “I’ve had a pretty horrible ordeal and actually figure I may be able to be a good sounding board for others … and it has pretty much destroyed my soul.”

Fawcett’s claim was approved, and he remains an employee of the company.

I have no problem with working dogs in general nor sled dogs in particular. I think dogs who are doing the work for which they’re bred are among the happiest dogs in the world, certainly happier than far too many bored, overweight, under-challenged couch pups.

But there is no breed of dog that was bred to be gunned down, a hundred at a time, by a single unqualified worker, while 200 other chained dogs watched and listened. That is an obscenity.

When I was at the North American Veterinary Conference last month, I attended a number of presentations that made reference to “The Five Freedoms.” (Our own Ericka Basile wrote about one of them here.)

The Five Freedoms grew out of a 1965 UK government investigation into inhumane farm practices, which resulted in the 1967 formation of the Farm Animal Welfare Advisory Committee (now the Farm Animal Welfare Council). After going through a number of incarnations, the “five freedoms” became these:

Freedom from thirst and hunger – by ready access to fresh water and a diet to maintain full health and vigour.Freedom from discomfort – by providing an appropriate environment including shelter and a comfortable resting area.Freedom from pain, injury, and disease – by prevention or rapid diagnosis and treatment.Freedom to express normal behavior – by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind.Freedom from fear and distress – by ensuring conditions and treatment which avoid mental suffering.

Today, those freedoms are being applied to all populations of animals held, kept, sheltered, and worked by humans, from animal shelters to ranches to family farms. They are not honored everywhere nor even in most places where people keep animals. But they are a set of standards being more widely adopted every day, and against which there is no legitimate opposition.

One of the ways in which the last freedom is always interpreted is that animals should never be killed, slaughtered, euthanized — use whatever term you like — in the sight or hearing of other animals. And the animals who are dying need to die in a way that’s swift and as free of stress as possible.

We can argue all day long about the nuances and terms of these standards. I’ve had those debates already, and I’m sure I’ll have a hundred more. But every organization or business, from animal shelter to farm, that doesn’t live up to those standards is going to find itself increasingly expected to do so, or face consequences ranging from legal penalties to greater regulation to criminal charges.

If the sled dog tour industry wants to hold its head up for one more day, if it wants to continue to exist even beyond this winter, it needs to not just denounce this brutal action, but make sure the “culling” of its retired dogs is handled by adoption, sanctuary, and creative re-homing, not by the bullet nor even by the needle.

At least one Canadian sled-dogging guide agrees. From the Toronto Globe and Mail:

“Any dog sledder who culls dogs at the end of a season should be culled himself, as far as we’re concerned,” said Paul McCormick, head dog sledding guide for Wilderness Adventures, a Toronto-based company that runs dog-sledding trips through Canada’s Algonquin Park.

“You don’t go out and cull dogs,” he said. “We’re part of the largest dog sled operation in the world with 40 dogs and we never cull dogs. We retire them, they’re adopted … there are a lot of alternatives.”

The veterinarian who refused to kill those dogs was right, even if their ultimate fates may haunt him. All our activities on this planet need to be sustainable, and if we bring sled dogs, or any other animals, into this world, they’re our responsibility.

Our business plans, our economic models, can’t be based on an exit strategy drenched in animal blood, that becomes the stuff of human nightmares.

Photo from a CTV.ca report.

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