Beyond their pampered lives of prams, designer clothes and doggie spas lies a far more gruesome truth for many Hong Kong puppies. Patrick Brzeski investigates the reality of our pet trade and how atrocities are allowed to occur right under our noses

The prize poodle

Esther the toy poodle is perched nervously atop a tall grooming table, her small pointy face alternating between happy-tongued
smiles and paroxysms of desperate-eyed doggie terror. A short leash attaches Esther’s Gucci dog collar to an aluminium rod suspended above the table, holding her in place, as Ms Mak, her groomer, methodically snips, clips and vacuums Esther’s white coat into the fluffy balls and queasy bare zones of the poodle’s classic Continental show cut. As the grooming session comes to a close, Ms Mak unclips Esther, presents her with an organic, vitamin-fortified mini milk bone, and gently passes her to Mrs Lam, Esther’s ever-doting “mummy.”

Like a great many of the prize purebred dogs one regularly sees paraded by leash or pushed in puppy prams around Hong Kong’s upscale neighbourhoods on clement evenings, since her purchase at a Causeway Bay pet shop as a young pup for $4,000 two years ago, Esther has enjoyed a lifestyle of near-constant anthropomorphic pampering. She goes to the doggie spa at least twice a month, dines at a Soho pet bakery at prices competitive with human meals, dons the latest season’s designer dog wear, and is just generally showered with cuddles and kisses and coos throughout all her waking hours.

But while such treatment is fairly typical for spoiled pets in big cities everywhere, Esther and many Hong Kong dogs like her harbour a dreadful secret history. For, despite all the love and luxury of her present day lifestyle, before her purchase from the pet shop, Esther likely lived through a puppyhood of indescribable horror and suffering.

The puppy factory

Purebred golden retrievers, bulldogs, terriers, basset hounds, poodles, and other unrecognisable breeds are all cramped in cages so small they can hardly turn around, their skin covered in sores, teats sagging, nails overgrown – nearly all visibly malnourished. “Most of these breeding grounds are worse than refugee camps,” says William Tung, as he shows me the photos he has taken at the underground puppy farms he has discovered throughout the New Territories over the years. “And this is where a lot of the puppies sold at Hong Kong pet stores come from.”

Since retiring from his manufacturing management job six years ago, Tung, 51 years old and a lifelong animal lover, has devoted nearly all of his free time to rescuing neglected and abused animals. He maintains a diffuse network of contacts of likeminded animal lovers throughout Kowloon and the New Territories who come to him when they hear of abused or unwanted animals in their neighbourhoods.

“For the most part, the puppy breeding farms are very well hidden,” Tung explains. “The owners treat the dogs like money machines. They keep them in small cages, sometimes on balconies, where they aren’t protected from the rain, or in small dark shacks.” Many breeders have told him they feed the dogs leftover scraps collected from bakeries and restaurants to save on expenses. “They breed them over and over, so that they can sell as many puppies as possible.”

Last fortnight, Hong Kong Dog Rescue, a well known dog rehabilitation and re-housing charity based in Tai Po, made news by adopting 18 British Bulldogs from an anonymous breeder based in Sheung Shui. One of the dogs died in transport, and two of the three puppies collected died the day after arrival at the kennel; nearly all of the surviving dogs were female, overweight, heavily fatigued and suffering from serious skin rashes, having been kept in small cages, denied exercise and presumably bred without respite for years. As various news outlets reported, the donation to Hong Kong Dog Rescue was brokered by an unidentified middleman who approached the owner after learning that the dogs were to be killed or sold to another breeder if no one intervened. That middle man was William Tung.

“One of my friends in the area told me about a breeder who was looking to get rid of a bunch of dogs because the guy was going bankrupt from gambling debts,” he explains. “We knew that if we didn’t get the dogs out of there, they probably would end up killed or sold to someone else who would keep breeding them in miserable conditions. This is how it usually happens; we hear about some dogs and we do whatever it takes to get them out of there. Sometimes we have to raise money in the community to buy them ourselves.”

Although Tung estimates that he’s helped rescue and re-home between 400 and 500 dogs over the years, there are notable cases that still haunt him, instances where the animal abuse was nightmarishly grotesque and there was nothing he could do to stop it. “One of my friends once got into a breeding facility in Yuen Long, where they were keeping hundreds of purebred dogs in a dark warehouse,” he remembers, growing quiet. “They had cut the mothers’ throats in a way so they couldn’t bark, and they had knocked out most of their teeth, because sometimes the mothers go crazy being kept in those small cages in the dark all the time, and they’ll bite the babies.” Tung says his friend was unwilling to go to the police with what he had seen and insisted on not discussing it further. “The guys behind that facility were the type of guys who are involved in other illegal activities. He didn’t think it was safe to talk about.”

We mentioned such stories to Hong Kong University Associate Professor of Law Amanda Whitfort, author of a two-year comprehensive legal review of Hong Kong’s animal welfare and animal cruelty laws. “Yes, we know pets are coming off puppy farms and kitten farms,” she says. “If you buy a pet shop puppy, you’re asking for a world of trouble. You will be very lucky if that animal’s not sick or inbred.”

A scholar and leading domestic expert on animal welfare, Whitfort is not the sort to make extemporaneous assertions. In 2006, working with local veterinarians and animal clinics, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals launched a survey investigating the health of puppies purchased from Hong Kong pet shops. Earlier this year they released their findings, which were included in Professor Whitfort’s report. Of the 202 puppies studied, 10 per cent were sick on the day of purchase, 72 per cent of them became sick within a week, and a staggering 30 per cent died shortly after. “So what does that tell you about where these animals come from,” asks Whitfort. “It’s disgusting, that’s what it is.”

The pet shop window

How – you’re now probably wondering – is such a state of affairs possible in an international city like Hong Kong? Surely there are animal cruelty laws and enforcement bodies charged with preventing such egregious and grotesque abuse of animals within the SAR.

Indeed, there are. In order to breed animals commercially in Hong Kong, one must obtain an Animal Trading licence from the Agricultural and Fisheries Control Department. While the requirements concerning the size of enclosures, feeding and exercise regimens, and other assorted criteria concerning the care of the animals are embarrassingly behind international animal welfare standards (on which, more later), the AFCD are actually quite scrupulous in enforcing Hong Kong’s limited laws and only grant licences to those who patently prove that they are meeting the basic legal standards. None of the conditions described above would be permissible under Hong Kong’s Animal Trader licencee requirements. But the licenced breeders aren’t the problem, because in fact, there are only two of them in all of Hong Kong, and both of them sell animals direct to customers, circumventing the pet shop industry entirely.

Regulated imports are a second legal source of puppies and kittens in Hong Kong, explains Whitfort, but in recent years the AFCD has reported a considerable decline in dog and cat import numbers. From 2005 to 2006, 1,970 dogs were imported to Hong Kong for sales each year, while from 2007 to 2009, an average of 1,033 dogs were brought in. A similar downward trend is observed in cat imports.

So if the licenced breeders don’t sell to pet shops, and legal import numbers are on the decline, where do Hong Kong’s hundreds of pet shops get the tens of thousands of animals they sell annually?

Loopholes and smugglers

The third and final legal source for pet store puppies and kittens are “private pet owners.” If your dog happens to have puppies, you are legally entitled to sell the pups to a licenced Hong Kong pet store. And surely such an allowance makes sense, as a means of preventing unwanted puppies from going abandoned. Yet there is currently no cap on how many puppies a so-called “private pet owner” can sell to a pet store; and therein lies the loophole through which untold thousands of puppies and kittens are channelled into the Hong Kong pet market with little to no regulation. “This loophole allows people to sell their animals to pet shops without licences, because they say they are selling their own pets,” explains Whitfort. “And if they are unlicenced, then of course there is no welfare check, no requirement that you let anybody from AFCD onto your premises, no requirement that you provide your animals with a certain amount of space, that you vaccinate them, that you care for them. There’s just nothing. You can have your thousands of animals, and nobody can control what you’re doing.”

Cross-border smuggling is also believed to be a major source of pet shop animals, although confirming the extent of the activity is notoriously difficult to determine. “We’ve heard about all different ways in which puppies are being smuggled over – in trucks and boats,” says Tony Ho, who joined the SPCA as Chief Inspectorate three years ago, after 35 years of service on the Hong Kong Police Department as a Chief Superintendant. Tung also reports hearing stories from community members about puppies pulled from container trucks in chicken crates, apparently drugged into a stupor so that they don’t bark during passage. “It’s something that is very difficult to trace back. You can try to tighten the border, but you can’t just rely on enforcement action,” says Ho.

Enforcement failures

In February of this year, the AFCD introduced significant improvements to Hong Kong’s pet trader licensing requirements. Under the new regulations, all dogs for sale must be implanted with a microchip containing the animal’s ID number, which can then be scanned to access its official vaccination records and licencing data. All pet stores are also required to keep a record of every animal bought, sold or deceased on its premises; stores are additionally responsible for verifying that puppies bought from private breeders have the proper certificate verifying that they are the offspring of a particular licenced dog.

These requirements would presumably provide the AFCD with the data necessary for determining which so called private pet sellers are breeding animals on an unregulated commercial scale – simply by collating the data to track which “private pet sellers” are producing puppies by the hundreds – yet, our inquiries suggest that the AFCD are in no way collecting and implementing this new data for tactical use. When we asked an information officer at the AFCD how they plan to use the new pet store info at their disposal, he politely corrected us, saying, “We do not keep this information, the pet stores do.” To what end that information is being kept is by no means clear.

Legal impotence

Despite these presumed failures, to some extent the AFCD are in an untenable position, for which they alone cannot be blamed.
“The AFCD patrols, but they only have eight staff allocated to this, patrolling pet shops and looking for unlicenced breeders and checking welfare generally,” explains Whitfort. “So you can imagine the level of care that’s going into this. They can be doing their very best, but it’s impossible. It’s not enough for all of Hong Kong.” And even when the AFCD does discover underground breeding or savage animal cruelty, the legal tools at their disposal for punishment and deterrence are paltry. At present, the maximum penalty the AFCD can impose for unlicenced breeding is $2,000 – which is roughly equivalent to the profit of a single puppy sale. Likewise with animal cruelty laws and licencing standards. “Believe it or not, if a pet store owner is convicted of an act of animal cruelty – which is highly unlikely in Hong Kong, but still – the AFCD currently lacks the authority to withdraw the individual’s animal trading licence,” says Whitfort. “All they can do is wait for it to expire.”

As Whitfort laments in her legal review, Hong Kong’s Animal Cruelty Ordinance is based on a British Protection of Animals Act introduced in 1911. The Hong Kong Ordinance was enacted in 1935 and hasn’t been comprehensively updated since. “We followed an old UK law, they have changed it, and we are still sitting here with the old rubbish,” she says. “We haven’t done anything about the fact that the world has moved on.” Chief Inspectorate Ho concurs: “The AFCD works with the resources at their disposal, but the main area in need of improvement is the enhancement of the law.” (See side story, Letter of the Law)

Hong Kong hearts animals

It’s a hot July Sunday in Sheung Shui and hundreds of people from all walks of life have gathered in the concrete courtyard of the local AFCD outpost – local villagers, urban professionals, and countless university-aged kids, everyone sweaty, uncomfortable, and energised. One week prior, a neighbourhood animal lover caught two AFCD dog catchers on video as they brutally choked two stray dogs in the process of capturing them for disposal. The footage was quickly uploaded to Facebook, whereupon hundreds of outraged comments came pouring in and a protest was promptly organised. “I’ve never been a part of any activist group,” says Rembert Meyer-Rothchow, a German-born lawyer and 12-year resident of Hong Kong. “But I saw that horrible footage online and felt compelled to come out and check this out.” Meyer-Rothchow turns towards the front of the crowd and joins in the chants.

“Hong Kong people are showing that they care very significantly about animals,” says Professor Whitfort. “And I believe that the government itself recognises the public wants animal cruelty to be taken seriously.” While a legal overhaul is likely to be slow in coming, a great many Hong Kong individuals – out of nothing more than large-hearted personal conviction – are working independently to counter the system’s insufficiencies. “A lot of the time when I get dogs away from breeders and get them donated to different groups, no one even knows I’m the guy who made it happen,” says William Tung. “But I honestly don’t care. I just want to get them out and living in a better place.”

Read about four of the leaders of Hong Kong’s animal welfare fight. Or find out if food animals (such as pigs, cattle, chicken, etc) in Hong Kong are treated any better.