# The Kennel Club working in partnership with Animals Asia Foundation



## Guest (Sep 29, 2008)

*Taken from KCDog Bulletin September 2008*

_China's growing affluence is creating a growing demand for dogs and cats as food.

Each year many millions of dogs are rounded up, crammed into tiny cages and loaded onto trucks to be transported for days under hellish conditions to animal markets. Here they are bludgeoned to death, strangled, bled out, or boiled alive. Their death comes slowly because of the mistaken belief that torture equals taste.

The challenge to change centuries of tradition is daunting, but attitudes are rapidly changing in China as more and more people are keeping pets and becoming aware of animal welfare. Never has there been a better time to act.

Animals Asia Foundation (AAF) is the leading animal welfare organisation working at the grass-roots level in China. It funds many initiatives within the country to capitalise on the new wave of change. These include the distribution of 133,000 dog and cat carepacks, working with authorities on the drafting of new dog regulations aimed at halting barbaric dog culls, financial and moral support for fledgling animal welfare groups run by Chinese nationals, and the hosting of an annual Companion Animals Symposium attended by over 40 Chinese animal welfare groups.

AAF also run two pioneering programmes, Dr Dog and Professor Paws, whereby ambassador dogs are invited into Chinese hospitals, residential homes, schools and universities, creating a media frenzy wherever they go and effecting changes at the community level.

The Kennel Club is currently working in partnership with AAF to hihglight the inhumane treatment of dogs in China. We condemn the acts of extreme cruelty which take place in China's animal markets where millions of dogs are skinned alive and killed for fur and meat every year. In Parliament Bob Russell MP has labelled an EDM on the subject. Please write to your MP and ask them to sign_ *EDM 1882 Inhumane Treatment of dogs in China*

_To view further information on this issue please visit AAF - Index_


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