Animals Also Killed & Abused In China!

china animal abuse

With all of the talk about China's poor human rights and limited freedoms for their people, the topic of how horrid their animal rights are has been lost in the mix. China has a horrible record of animal rights, with no laws protecting small animals which are often skinned alive for their fur and meat. Recently China has ordered dog meat (warning, link has sad picture) to be taken off the menu at its 112 official Olympic restaurants in Beijing. Dogs are a common meat source in China, so they have made this rule in order to avoid offending foreign visitors. It has been reported that dogs are also often skinned and butchered alive, as it is thought that the meat tastes better when the dog is in excruciating agony when they are killed.

Many companies like Eli Lilly outsource their animal testing research to China because they are able to avoid nearly all the laws against animal cruelty that we have in the US.

The Chinese are big fans of horse fighting as well, where stallions are whipped into a frenzy, a mare is shown to them and then taken away so they will fight. When one of the stallions falls down or runs away, the other one is declared the winner and then the winning horses fight each other. The last two winners left then fight it out to be champion.

Bear farming has been another disgusting and cruel practice in China since the 1990s. The bears are cut open while they are alive, and their bile is extracted for use in traditional Chinese medicine.  Their wounds are then kept open so that they can continue to remove the bile daily. The bears are usually kept in very small cages that don't support their size, which often causes the bears to self mutilate themselves. The cubs at the farms are taken away from their mothers when they are as young as three months of age, but in the wild they stay with their mothers until they are eighteen months old.  The bear farms also jeopardize the wild bears as they are often captured and killed for the farms production.

Bear farms were trying to become registered as commercial captive breeding centres under CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, of which China is a signatory), in order to allow international trade of bear bile. If this was to occur, the trading of the bear bile would lead to consumer products such as bear soap, facial cream, wine, eye drops, and anything else you can think of.

Although the human rights issues of China take a center stage, the lack of animal rights in China is despicable. The cruelty to animals goes on and on with no end in sight.