Shocking video from China shows a dog being boiled alive at a busy public market, and the viral footage is now drawing a strong international backlash.
The video shows a horrific scene in which a greyhound was carried to a boiling cauldron of water and then lowered in on a stick as people in the crowd cheered and laughed. As the Mirror noted, the video shows the desperate dog howling in pain and desperately trying to escape the boiling water.
The video of the dog being boiled alive quickly went viral, drawing international media attention and condemnation from animal rights activists. Michele Brown, a leader in the fight for animal rights, told the Mirror that the video circulating this week is a particularly disturbing example of the cruelty that takes place in Asian markets.
“This animal died the worst death imaginable,” she said. “You can see raw fear in the dog’s eyes as its carried towards the boiling water. As they drop the dog into the water it screams for help, skin burning and blistering. It flails around so much, two strong men have to hold on to the lid.”
“The young boy is an innocent child and he appears to be repulsed by what he saw.”
China has been a hotbed of abuse to dogs, the Mirror report noted, with many of the slaughtered animals coming from the U.K. as former pets and racing dogs. Rita James, an activist in England, said there is a pipeline taking greyhounds from racing circles in Ireland to the Far East, where they are killed and sold as food.
The video of the dog being boiled alive reportedly came from Shijiazhuang, a city of 2 million people in the nation’s Hebei Province. Some of the dogs killed there are raised in cages on industrial farms while others were stolen pets sold on the black market.
Dog meat is considered a delicacy in China, and traders deliberately kill them in the most painful ways possible so the animals die filled with adrenaline, the Mirror noted.
There are also efforts in the United States to stop the flow of dogs to markets in Asian nations. In Austin, Texas, a group called Addicus’ Legacy Dog Rescue is trying to bring attention to the practice, which often has dogs being jammed into cages in trucks and transported from Thailand to China. There are sometimes more than 1,600 dogs in a single truck, the Dallas Morning News reported, and many of them die of suffocation before reaching their destination.
Amy Stanton, director of Addicus’ Legacy Dog Rescue, said there are tens of thousands of dogs killed in the same way in Asian markets each year.
“We’re not making judgment calls about whether or not they’re eating the dog meat,” Stanton said. “The issue is the torture and violence that goes into the process.”
Dog meat has been a traditional food in China for centuries, but it has become much more popular in the last three decades, the Mirror noted. The outrage over the video of the dog being boiled alive has also been seen with a number of other graphic videos of this dog meat trade in action.
One of the most controversial aspects is China’s Yulin festival, a 10-day annual event that takes place in a rural region of the country. During the festival, more than 10,000 dogs and cats are slaughtered for their meat, leading animal rights activists to call for the festival to be banned. Chinese government officials have been slow to move on these requests, however, noting that the festival is privately organized and run.
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Video of the dog being boiled alive can be seen here, but be warned that it contains some very graphic images.
[Photo by Andy Wong/AP Images]
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