PETA video claims China mislabels and exports dog leather
U.S. animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has released a video on Twitter claiming that dog skins are being mislabeled in China and exported to other countries.
PETA tweeted the video on Sunday, saying "many people don't know that dog leather from China is mislabeled and sold worldwide."
The 32-second video showed dead dogs being skinned and their bodies being piled up on the ground at an unidentified location in China. The video also shows animal skins being made into leather gloves.
Jason Baker, vice president of international campaigns for PETA Asia, told the Global Times in a statement on Monday that dogs are bludgeoned and killed and their skins are made into leather gloves, jacket collars and trim, cat toys and belts.
Baker added that those products are often mislabeled as sheepskin.
"Short of doing a DNA test, there's no way to tell whose skin you're really in," he said.
According to a previous report by the Daily Mail, PETA had visited three slaughterhouses and six processing plants in Central China and found that the plants were producing dog leather for export. One owner of a processing plant told a PETA investigator that they export dog skin as lambskin.
Dog skins also have been sold as the skins of leopards, tigers and foxes in East China's Fujian Province, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and Northeast China's Jilin Province after being bleached and painted, various media have reported.
Each fake skin was purchased for around 30 yuan and was sold at around 300 yuan ($45.45) by vendors busted by law enforcement officers in Emin County, Xinjiang, news website iyaxin.com reported in 2013.
