Police Rescue 386 Dogs Headed For A Dog Meat Festival In China

The Lychee and Dog Meat Festival is an annual festival in Yulin, China, where festival goers eat dog meat and lychees. The night before this year’s festival, police stopped a truck conveying 386 dogs to the venue.

The Shaanxi Police pulled over the truck 500 miles outside Yulin and found the dogs crammed in small wire cages without any room to stand, not to mention food or water. The police confiscated all the dogs, some of which were stolen pets, with help from animal activists.

“They had probably been on the truck for days, dehydrated and starving, many of them with visible signs of injury and disease,” one of the volunteers involved in the rescue operation, Lin Xiong, told Humane Society International (HSI). The dogs were headed for Yulin slaughterhouses, where they would have beaten them to death.

The Lychee and Dog Meat Festival began in 2009 and spans ten days. Since its inception, thousands of dogs have been brutally slaughtered each year. Despite petitions from animal rights groups to end the wicked festival, nothing has been done.

The rescued dogs, currently held at a police quarantine facility, are getting all the help they need to recover from the trauma. As soon as the police’s 21-day holding is over, HSI would step in to help the dogs find new homes.

Image Credit: HSI