The words ‘Yulin Dog Meat Festival’ leaves me speechless. The gut wrenching sadness and anger I feel towards this event grows stronger with every image I see and each year that passes.

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Yulin Dog Meat Festival is an annual celebration held in a town in China called Yulin, during the summer solstice in which festival goers eat dog meat. The people who support this event have tried to convince us that this 'festival' is a long standing tradition, but the truth is this festival began in Yulin in 2009.

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Each year in preparation for the festival, hundreds of thousands of dogs (if not millions) are stolen, forced to breed and crammed so tightly into small cages with hundreds of others. The conditions are so bad that their bones snap under the pressure whilst others are crushed and suffocated to death all while travelling long distances to be slaughtered. 

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For the ones that make it out of the cages, they are electrocuted, hung by the neck, stabbed, shot, beaten, limbs sawn off and boiled alive before their meat is consumed by human beings. 

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The believe of the local people is that the longer they torture the dogs, the more tender the meat will be and the healthier for the humans consuming it. Due to these backward believes these innocent dogs are subjected to days and weeks of horrific torturing and suffering, more than we would be able to comprehend.

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Eating dog meat is not just confined to Yulin but is a wide spread practice across Asia. 13 to 16 million dogs are eaten in Asia annually with dog being a common item on restaurant menus in China, Vietnam, North Korea and South Korea. This figure is mind blowing and it has to stop.

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With each year that passes and every festival that begins, more people are becoming aware of what is happening at Yulin and animal activists have been able to infiltrate trucks full of dogs and rescue many dogs from the grips of death.

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One organisation that stands out for me and I have been following their journey for the past 2 years is the Animal Hope & Wellness Foundation. The AHWF are a non-for-profit organisation who rescue dogs from the Asian Dog Meat Trade and who also rescue and rehabilitate neglected animals in the US. Founder Marc Ching has dedicated his career to saving dogs from the barbaric trade and has so far made 7 trips to Asia, where he goes undercover into the slaughterhouses and rescues dogs directly by negotiating with the perpetrators. The below video is a short introduction into how Marc rescues the dogs, his negotiating methods and what his mission is. (Warning footage at 4:00 to 4:16 is disturbing)

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