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From plate to playmate: dogs saved from Chinese meat market

Published:Sunday | February 14, 2021 | 12:19 AM

No Dog Left Behind has sought to save mutts from Chinese dinner plates.
No Dog Left Behind has sought to save mutts from Chinese dinner plates.

No Dogs Left Behind, a global animal welfare organisation, is transporting rescued dogs from the Yulin Meat Festival and Chinese meat markets to their forever families in North America.

The 29 adopted survivors were scheduled to fly into LAX on February 13 before heading to their final destination to JFK the following day.

No Dogs Left Behind has successfully transported more than 200 dogs during the pandemic to eagerly awaiting families across North America.

With help from hundreds of activists in China and the United States, founder Jeffery Beri rescues dogs from slaughterhouses, dog meat trucks, wet markets, the Yulin Meat Festival, and illegal dog traffickers, and then transports them to safe havens where they receive medical care, nutritional support, and rehabilitation on an ongoing basis.

Fighting on the front lines to end the reckless slaughtering of animals, this movement will also put an end to the serious threat to human health as wet markets breed infectious diseases. While the majority of the population in China does not eat dog meat, it is estimated that more than 20 million dogs are still slaughtered each year. The Yulin Meat Festival is fast approaching where an estimated 10,000 dogs are brutally killed for consumption.

FOREVER FAMILIES

Over emails, phone calls, and even video chats, the companion animals have been matched with loving forever families in North America, who are now eagerly awaiting the arrival of their new best friends.

Each survivor walks the streets of North America as ambassadors for change, which also helps raise awareness of the need for all dogs across the world to find homes. The cost to transport the dogs has exponentially increased over the past year amid a global pandemic.

Essentially stranding the dogs in China for almost all of 2020 and limiting No Dogs Left Behind’s efforts to rescue more dogs, funds are urgently required to keep survivors coming home and to save the lives of many destined for the Yulin festival.

Fighting against recent COVID-19 outbreaks in China, which require extraordinary logistics, support, and planning to ensure safe passage, No Dogs Left Behind teams in China and the United States have coordinated this evacuation. No other rescue organisation has succeeded in mass-evacuation transport of this magnitude since the outbreak of the pandemic.

Among the many challenges, the evacuation required multiple construction efforts to build strategically placed housing throughout the country to provide shelter during the transport that would ensure the survivors were secured when or if areas were closed down for COVID-19 outbreaks.

No Dog Left Behind team members across the country travel with the dogs through every stage as they make their way to Beijing, then for their freedom flight to the United States.