Dog Meat Sold as Chicken; Dog Skin Sold as Leather
If you’ve eaten “chicken” while traveling in Indonesia and perhaps elsewhere, you may have actually eaten dog meat. Eyewitness investigators working for our friends at Animals Australia report that they filmed vendors in Bali selling tourists “chicken satay” that was actually dog meat. It’s legal to eat dogs in Indonesia, but the group says that vendors deliberately misrepresent the food to tourists.
According to Animals Australia, dogs are taken off the streets of Bali and poisoned, strangled, or clubbed. Seven times as many dogs die in Bali’s dog-meat industry each year as they do in China’s Yulin dog-eating festival. The animal-protection group has a team in Bali working to stop the island’s dog-meat trade. And elsewhere in the world, PETA is tackling a similar issue by making people aware that if they choose to wear leather, it could be dog leather.
Much leather comes from China, where dogs and cats are often killed for their skins. A PETA Asia eyewitness investigation revealed that a single slaughterhouse bludgeoned and skinned hundreds of dogs a day. The processed dog-skin leather is usually deliberately mislabeled before being sold all over the world. Even if a leather garment says that it was made in Italy or the U.S., the raw materials were likely imported from China, so there’s no easy way to know what animal the skin came from.
What You Can Do
Show the video to everyone you know, and please, don’t eat or wear animals. Grab your free vegan starter kit and drop leather from your wardrobe by choosing only vegan fabrics.
