Cruelty in China

Update! In response to a public outcry, the Chinese government has recently cancelled plans to allow hunters to buy licenses to kill wild animals, including some endangered species. Your voice can and will be heard - if you haven't already asked the government to halt the mass slaughter of dogs, please do so right now.

Click here to read one Chinese citizen's pleas to other countries for intervention as dogs are stolen from desperate owners and beaten to death in the streets. China's long history of animal abuse is back in the spotlight as one Chinese county indiscriminately massacres every dog in sight - more than 50,000 in total and some right in front of their families. This and other appalling atrocities - such as feeding live sheep and chickens to tigers in zoos and skinning conscious animals, including dogs and cats, for their fur, which is then exported to the West - take place because China has no animal protection laws.

Tens of Thousands of Dogs Are Being Clubbed, Poisoned and Electrocuted

In a hideously cruel response to an outbreak of rabies in late July, authorities in Mouding County in Southwest China ordered the killing of more than 50,000 dogs, including 4,000 who were immunised against the disease. Officials clubbed many animals to death in the street right before their guardians' eyes. Animals who were not beaten mercilessly died equally violent, gruesome deaths by poisoning or electrocution.

Read PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk's letters to the Chinese government in English or Chinese.

PETA's offices have been inundated over the years with calls from people around the world who are outraged by China's dog "exterminations". Eyewitnesses have noted that many dogs have died slow, agonising deaths in these mass slaughters, which illustrate the nation's lack of adequate animal control plans. PETA's offers to assist Chinese officials in implementing such plans - in order to avoid drastic, widespread killings - have not been accepted.

Other Common Atrocities

• Chinese authorities pay citizens a 5-yuan (33-pence) bounty for each dog they kill. Surprised that this nation places a price on the head of "man's best friend"? Don't be. Dogs and cats are even killed for their fur in China, as this undercover investigation, narrated by Trent Reznor, reveals.
• With the world's largest population of sheep, lambs, goats and kids, China is the world's most prolific exporter of the hides of these animals as well as those of cows. In 2004, Chinese leather constituted more than one-third of all exported leather in the world.
• China's live-animal markets are notoriously cruel. Animals of many species - from cats, dogs, birds and boars to deer and even reptiles - are confined to wire cages in which they can barely move. Their slaughter is no less depraved. Animals are routinely skinned alive and hacked apart, piece by piece, until they bleed to death.
• Wild animal parks housing tens of thousands of animals conduct live feedings of lions and tigers so that visitors can watch the gory spectacle.
• About 7,000 Asiatic black bears - also known as moon bears - are confined to tiny pens so small that they can't even move on China's more than 200 bear-bile farms. Although alternatives to their bile - which some people believe has healing properties - exist, bears are still subjected to crude surgeries in order to implant catheters or to create permanent holes in their abdomens.
• China supplies more than half the monkeys imported to the US for experiments, and that number has increased sevenfold in the last 10 years.