Sold by the kilo: China’s pet protection blind spot

180 RMB (roughly US$27) for 48 catty (jin 斤, equivalent to around 28.8 kilograms) — that was the price paid for border collie Chutou.

After nearly nine years with its owner and building an online following of more than a million, the celebrity dog was sold to a dog meat restaurant, where its value was reduced to its weight. When the owner finally traced the slaughter site after a challenging search, the worker who slaughtered the dog casually remarked: “I regretted it as soon as I’d done it. He was all fat, and old too.”

Yet in recent weeks, this old dog, dismissed as worthless by a dog meat trader, has touched the hearts of tens of thousands of Chinese netizens.

The case

Chutou had accompanied his owner, Guo, on years of road trips across China, gaining a large following. In March this year, Guo went on an overseas trip and left the dog in the care of his parents at their rural home in Henan. However, last month Chutou went missing, and despite a 5,000 RMB reward yielding no leads, Guo cut short his journey and returned to China to search for him.

After more than ten days of investigation and reviewing dozens of surveillance recordings, Guo finally traced the young couple who had taken Chutou, only to receive devastating news. On 11 May, Chutou had been taken near the family’s farmland, sold to a dog meat trader the same day, and already shaved and slaughtered.

When Guo confronted the young couple at their home, they insisted they had not “stolen” the dog but had merely “found it” by the roadside. However, police officers who arrived shortly afterwards quickly identified inconsistencies in their account based on the surveillance footage: the stretch of road where Chutou was taken was a dead end, making it unlikely that outsiders would have chanced upon him. Furthermore, the footage also showed the man pinning down the dog’s head while the woman used a windscreen cover from her electric scooter to hide its body.

Unable to explain away the inconsistencies, the family’s elders stepped in to broker a settlement, offering a few options: if Guo wanted a dog, they would give him their family’s golden retriever; if he wanted money, they would reimburse him the 180 RMB that Chutou had fetched, or even more. “I sold him for 180 RMB. How about 200 RMB? Is that alright?” one said in the local Henan dialect.

The value of a life

One cannot imagine the sense of helplessness and grief Guo must have felt upon hearing that offer. A companion that had accompanied him for years was reduced so casually to money, as though an extra 20 RMB could somehow erase all the wrongs that had been done.

Guo has made it clear that he will “never agree to a settlement” and intends to pursue every available legal avenue to seek justice for Chutou. The local police have also formally opened an administrative case for the theft of a pet dog. According to the latest Chinese media reports, the case has since become a criminal investigation, and the couple involved has been detained.

Lack of legislation

One of the reasons seeking justice is so challenging is because China still has no specific legislation dedicated to domestic pets. In a 2022 case in Beijing involving the poisoning of pets, it was only because of the persistence of the dog (Papi)’s owner that the case was eventually filed as an administrative matter. After a three-year legal battle, the perpetrator was ultimately sentenced to four years in prison for the offence of “endangering public safety by placing hazardous substances”, a ruling upheld on appeal in April this year.

Papi’s case resulted in a conviction on the grounds of “endangering public safety”, as poison placed in a residential compound could have harmed anyone. Meanwhile, Chutou’s case quickly went into criminal proceedings because the border collie’s market value exceeded 3,000 RMB, meeting the threshold for criminal theft. Had it been an ordinary rural mongrel, the case might well have taken a very different course.

Online discussions in China about Chutou’s case have largely focused on legal recourse and accountability. Public opinion has largely sided with the owner, reflecting a growing recognition of pets’ value in society. If this trend continues, the law may eventually evolve to recognise domestic pets as sentient beings with interests of their own, rather than merely personal property.

Dogs as food

What is less often discussed is why pet dogs are stolen and slaughtered, and the supply chain behind the dog meat trade. More than a decade ago, Western media reported that China was the world’s largest dog meat market, accounting for half of the roughly 30 million dogs consumed globally each year. Chutou’s case reveals that a sizeable market for dog meat still exists in China, operating largely out of public view.

It is undeniable that some parts of China have a long tradition of eating dog meat. However, the issue is not the tradition itself, but the source of the meat: it should not come from owned pets, and certainly not from those that have been stolen and resold. The man who slaughtered Chutou said in a video that he was used to killing pet dogs, including not only border collies, but also golden retrievers, labradors, and others. 

He also told the owner, “This is my job. What can I do?” It is his livelihood, and it is not easy for outsiders to judge him from a purely moral standpoint. Yet it cannot be ignored that he knew these animals may have come from households, but still wielded the knife, becoming an integral part of this grey supply chain.

What makes Chutou’s case so heartbreaking is how it exposes a stark indifference to life. A gentle, harmless pet dog is robbed of its life in an instant, driven only by a stranger’s fleeting greed. In an instant, a living being is stripped of all emotional weight and reduced to nothing more than a figure on a scale, fit only for trade. Over time, society’s empathy towards vulnerable lives is eroded, leaving a troubling question: how much further can the boundaries of human compassion be pushed?

This article was first published in Lianhe Zaobao as “被称重的生命”.

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