Soi Dog Foundation enlists teachers & practitioners of traditional medicine in campaign
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam––Sixty-four human deaths from rabies in Vietnam during the first nine months of 2023, an increase of 21 from the first nine months of 2022, have sparked renewed efforts to eradicate the dog and cat meat traffic.
Medically recognized as a rabies vector in Vietnam since 2009, imports of dogs for human consumption were prohibited in 2014 through the lobbying efforts of the Thailand-based Soi Dog Foundation.
(See Rabies risk is medically identified from eating dogs & cats, ASEAN nations move to implement dog meat trafficking ban, and Dog meat trade spreads rabies in Vietnam.)
Human deaths from rabies in Vietnam thereafter leveled off at an average of 82 per year until 2023, when the total may go higher.
The northern region closest to China, where dog-eating is most common, had 25 human rabies deaths through September 2023, with 15 human deaths in the heavily populated south, 15 human deaths in the central highlands, where access to medical treatment is sparse, and nine deaths in the central lowlands.
(Soi Dog Foundation photo)
Story of pediatric patients moves Viet public
Public attention to rabies increased in Vietnam after Saigon News reporter Quang Huy on October 2, 2023 described the suffering of two pediatric patients with rabies from Gia Lai and Dak Nong provinces.
The children, ages 8 and 13, arrived in Ho Chi Minh City with “encephalitis, severe brain damage, and life-threatening conditions,” Quang Hug wrote.
“Relatives said that the children had not previously told their families that they had been bitten by dogs,” Quang Huy recounted, but after the families discovered that the children had fevers, headaches, and wounds, with dead dogs near their homes, “they suspected that the children had been bitten by dogs and had rabies; hence, relatives took the two children to medical clinics for treatment.
(Soi Dog Foundation photo)
Milwaukee protocol?
“Currently, the two children escaped dangerous conditions and their health is stable,” Quang Huy finished.
However, if the two children already had encephalitis and severe brain damage upon arrival at the Ho Chi Minh City hospital, their chances of survival would have been poor, even if the Milwaukee Protocol was used.
Developed in 2004, the Milwaukee Protocol involves putting the rabies patient into an artificially induced coma while treating the rabid symptoms.
As of 2020, the Milwaukee Protocol had saved five out of 36 symptomatic patients, all of them between ages 7 and 15.
Ho Chi Minh City
The Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee [city council] back on May 17, 2023 “issued an urgent document directing departments and People’s Committees of districts and Thu Duc City to strengthen urgent measures to prevent and control rabies in the area,” reported Outbreak News Today, after “statistics over the past five years across the country show that rabies has killed 410 people, and over 2.7 million people have had to receive preventive treatment.
The Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee called for “ensuring access to human rabies vaccines, disseminating addresses of rabies vaccination points, and communicating instructions to guide people bitten by dogs and cats to medical facilities for timely preventive treatment,” Outbreak News Today said.
Further, the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee asked the Department of Agriculture & Rural Development to escalate efforts to vaccinate dogs and cats against rabies, including “promoting information and propaganda work” about the need to vaccinate and about what to do if a person is bitten by a dog or cat.
Dog-catching
Finally, communities were encouraged to establish animal control departments to apprehend “stray dogs,” which in Vietnam tends to include street dogs as well as owned dogs running at large.
Historically, dog-catching in Southeast Asia has been done chiefly by local entrepreneurs who receive only partial compensation from municipal governments, and realize most of their income from selling dogs to dog meat butchers or traffickers.
Much the same system prevailed in rural parts of the U.S. until late in the 20th century, except that U.S. dogcatchers working for profit sold dogs to laboratory animal suppliers.
(Soi Dog Foundation photo)
Traditional medics denounce use of dog & cat meat
Today, according to Soi Dog Foundation marketing and press officer Amy Bryant, “Vietnam’s education sector and traditional medicine community are spearheading efforts to end the dog and cat meat trade.
“Just last month,” Bryant emailed to ANIMALS 24-7 on November 10, 2023, “leaders of the Vietnam Oriental Traditional Medicine Association [VOTMA], the official voice of traditional medicine practitioners, categorically denounced the use of dog and cat meat in traditional medicine.”
On November 10, 2023, Bryant said, the Ha Nam Traditional Medicine Association, a VOTMA member, “followed suit at a workshop in the northern province, pledging to cease using dog and cat meat in their practices and to educate their peers and patients that there is no scientific evidence of its claimed medicinal qualities.
Teaching teachers
“The workshop,” Bryant said, “led by animal welfare organization Soi Dog International Foundation and social behavior change agency Intelligentmedia, included open discussion about the dog and cat meat trade, and expert coaching to equip Ha Nam’s traditional medicine practitioners with the knowledge and tools to discourage the use of dog and cat meat among their patients.”
Also, Bryant wrote, “In a separate but complementary initiative in Hanoi,” the Vietnamese capital city, “on November 3, 2023 teachers from more than 30 secondary schools joined together to discuss ways to educate the next generation about the ethical and health implications of the dog and cat meat trade and inspire them to effect change.
“The event centered on animal welfare and responsible pet ownership, as well as rabies prevention,” Bryant said.
(Soi Dog Foundation photo)
Soi Dog took issue to the Vietnamese National Assembly
Estimating that as many as five million dogs and one million cats per year are killed for human consumption in Vietnam each year, the Soi Dog Foundation in July 2023 “participated in a roundtable discussion with [members of] the Vietnamese National Assembly “to discuss a roadmap for ending the trade, starting with Hanoi,” Bryant added.
“It was the first time,” Bryant said, “that the trade and consumption of dogs and cats had been deliberated upon at this level of government.”
The Soi Dog Foundation has since 2013 housed and provided veterinary care for more than 16,400 dogs impounded from dog meat dealers and traffickers, chiefly in Thailand, where the dog meat trade is illegal but where dealers formerly exported dogs for human consumption in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and China.
(See Viet shelter sold dogs for meat; U.S. shelters sold dogs to fighters and Soi Dog Foundation shuts down a Vietnamese cat slaughterhouse.)
Humane Society International shuts down dealer
Bryant sent the Soi Dog Foundation media release about rabies control efforts in Vietnam three days after Humane Society of the U.S. president Kitty Block posted that the HSUS subsidiary Humane Society International had bought out and shut down a major Vietnamese dog meat dealer, who over the past seven years had “bought, sold, and slaughtered as many as 20,000 dogs.
The Vietnamese dealer, the 18th dog meat dealer that Humane Society International claims to have put out of business in the past decade, mostly in South Korea, turned over to HSI 44 caged dogs who will now be rehabilitated for adoption.
The Humane Society International campaign began under Block, who headed Humane Society International before her 2018 promotion to the Humane Society of the U.S. presidency.
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All of this is all true and so so gross. I remember once in Hong Kong in 1996 when I was getting exported due to the takeover by the CCP; I remember seeing rows and rows of puppy cages full of dogs of all types lined up at the Shenzhen Train Station. I asked my guide if the people around here were fond of dogs (assuming pet store shipments). He laughed and said Yeah, for dinner. I walked up to the 8-foot-high and 30-foot-long stack of doggies and could not fathom them all as burgers or stir-fry. That scene would be too horrific. So I just tickled as many ears as I could before departing and wished them all well, as dim-sum.
Jigs you’ll be happy to know that in 2020 China’s city of Shenzhen passed a law to ban the consumption and production of dog and cat meat, the first city in mainland China to do so.
I can’t even put into words my feelings toward anyone that would harm a cat.
Goes to show you that humans will devour every/any animal, none spared. Just think EIGHT BILLION flesh-eating humans devouring all animals! Makes me wonder about “environmentalists” fighting for wildlife conservation, and I think of the American bison:
Q. Why were the American Bison almost wiped out in the 1800’s?
A. In an increasingly consumerist society during the 19th century…bison were hunted to the brink of extinction by frontier whites. Commodities, mainly bison hides for jackets and leather, were extremely popular, profitable and fashionable back in the eastern regions of the United States.
“Saved” from extinction, today they are being hunted and “raised” on ranches for human consumption. What an ignoble species we humans are!
Actually bison were nearly hunted to extinction on the Great Plains as part of a post-U.S. Civil War military strategy to subjugate the mounted Native American tribes who followed the herds by removing their means of sustenance, thereby opening the Great Plains to agrarian settlement. Finding economic uses for bison remains, including bones as well as hides, largely followed the introduction of the killing policy. Before that, and before the rapid expansion of railways that followed the U.S. Civil War, transporting bison hides and bones long distances was economically prohibitive.