Background

Bred, raised and killed solely for the fur industry

The dogs and cats killed for their fur in China are generally raised on breeding farms, cold unsanitary breeding compounds, many are located in Northern China. These cats and dogs are literally ‘farmed’ for their fur. Often, breeders are not businesses as such, but a large number come from Chinese families that keep a few cats, or dogs, in appalling conditions, often these pitiful animals are kept outside so that their coat grows thicker. At the beginning of the winter they kill the dogs or cats and sell the pelts to fur traders. Many of the villages have open-air fur markets that serve as collection points for the pelts of cats and dogs killed locally. Others are stolen companion animals, and some are abandoned strays.

The larger breeding farms, referred to by the German journalist Karreman as “worse than concentration camps”, keep up to 300 animals at a time in appalling, squalid conditions. Diseases such as parvo virus, canine distemper and leptospirosis spread like wildfire in dogs whose immune system is already low due to depression and starvation. Live dogs, chained by thin metal wires, many of them pups under six months old, are kept in dark, windowless and bitterly cold sheds, surrounded by the bodies of dead dogs hanging from hooks.

This is how the dogs live out their grim existence before being crammed into filthy tight sacks to make the harrowing journey to the slaughterhouse – a trip which could take up to three days while they suffer without food and water. They go their whole unbearable lives from the very beginning to final brutal end without ever having known one single kind word, or soft stroke.