The last dogs out of Yulin's oldest slaughterhouse

Doges Editorial · 2026-06-13 · 5 min read

For the first time in Yulin's history, a dog slaughterhouse has permanently closed — not through a raid, but through a deal that gave its owner a way out and nine dogs a chance at a different life.

Three of the nine dogs still had their collars on when Vshine Animal Protection Association workers arrived. A Labrador named An An. A beagle named Moli. A poodle named Lian. The collars told the rescuers everything they needed to know: these were not strays. These were someone's family, taken from a yard or a street somewhere in the Guangxi countryside and brought to a facility outside Yulin, China, that had been killing dogs for meat every week since 2007. On June 7, 2026, they were the last animals to leave that building alive.

A business that ran for nineteen years

The slaughterhouse, located roughly 30 kilometers south of Yulin's city center, permanently closed when its owner — identified publicly under the pseudonym Mr. Huang — signed a legally binding agreement with Vshine on June 8, backed by financial support from Humane World for Animals. The organizations announced it as Yulin's first-ever "livelihood conversion": not a police raid, not a legal injunction, but a negotiated exit that gave Mr. Huang money and support to rebuild his working life around something else.

By the organizations' estimates, more than 15,000 dogs were killed at the facility over nineteen years — an average of about 15 animals each week. June was always the high season. With the annual Yulin dog meat festival driving demand, the month typically accounted for roughly 70 percent of the slaughterhouse's annual revenue. The festival this year is scheduled for June 20 and 21.

I'm looking forward to a peaceful life. I have been killing dogs for almost 20 years. It's a dirty business and I don't feel good about it.

— Mr. Huang, slaughterhouse owner (translated by Humane World for Animals)

How you close a slaughterhouse through negotiation

Humane World for Animals has spent more than a decade running what it calls its Models for Change program — helping people involved in the dog meat trade in South Korea, Vietnam, India, and Indonesia find alternative livelihoods. The Yulin closure is the first time the model has worked inside the Guangxi region, which has been the symbolic center of China's dog meat trade and the site of the annual festival that has attracted international condemnation since its first edition in 2010.

The approach is grounded in economics as much as ethics. The dog meat market across China is contracting. Urban consumption has declined for years. Younger generations keep dogs as companions and view the trade very differently than their parents did — a shift visible in the numbers: China's pet market reached $41.9 billion in 2024, and the country now has an estimated 80 million pet dogs, the largest pet dog population in Asia. Mr. Huang named both forces: the work had worn on him morally for years, and the income was becoming increasingly unreliable.

A 2025 survey conducted by Vshine covered 160 Yulin residents across eight agricultural markets, fifty dog meat restaurants, and four live slaughterhouses. It found that 87.5 percent never or rarely eat dog or cat meat, and 88 percent said a nationwide ban on the trade would have no impact on their lives. Those figures give domestic advocates something harder to dismiss than moral argument alone: local data showing that closing the trade threatens neither the livelihoods nor the daily habits of most people in the city it has made infamous. (Humane World for Animals, humaneworld.org, 2025.)

As fewer people are eating dog meat these days, it's hard for me to provide for my family. I am relieved to be leaving it behind me and having a more stable living. Without the support from this program, I would not have been able to make this life change — but I think a lot more dog meat businesses in Yulin would choose to close if they had this kind of support.

— Mr. Huang

Mr. Huang is now considering a breakfast catering business: rice porridge, fried dough, steamed buns. A different kind of morning work in a city where mornings used to mean something else for the dogs passing through his facility.

Nine dogs, three with collars

When Vshine workers arrived to collect the remaining animals before final closure, nine dogs were on the property awaiting slaughter. Three of them — An An, Moli, and Lian — were still wearing the collars that mark a dog as belonging to a household. Vshine described them as "clearly stolen pets." Dogs are taken with enough frequency in the Yulin region that three collared animals at a single facility in a single week wasn't a surprise to anyone working in Chinese animal rescue.

All nine are now receiving veterinary care at a Vshine shelter, where they will be quarantined, vaccinated, and sterilized before being made available for adoption. Their previous owners — if they are still looking — are unlikely to know where to search.

It was very disturbing to step foot into this dog slaughterhouse where so many dogs have lost their lives so brutally over the years. This cruel and dirty trade has no place in modern China — and the Yulin dog meat festival is a stain on China's international reputation.

— Chen Xiaolei, Vshine Animal Protection Association

One closure, a much larger trade

The numbers behind what this single closure doesn't solve are significant. China remains the world's largest market for dog and cat meat by volume. Estimates put annual slaughter at roughly 10 million dogs and 4 million cats. The festival itself has already contracted markedly: early reports estimated roughly 10,000 dogs consumed at Yulin each year at its peak; by 2015 that figure had fallen to an estimated 1,000, driven by a decade of international pressure and the same generational shift Mr. Huang described. Against the national figures, nine animals and one agreement still amount to a rounding error. But the people involved have been explicit about what they are counting: not just bodies, but precedents.

Earlier this year, Vshine submitted a formal legislative proposal to China's National People's Congress calling for a nationwide ban on the dog and cat meat trade. The proposal has not advanced, but the fact of its submission marks a shift in where these arguments are being made — inside formal institutions, not only outside them. Several Chinese cities, including Shenzhen and Zhuhai, have already enacted their own bans.

What the collars mean

An An, Moli, and Lian will most likely be adopted into new homes. The people who put those collars on them — who adjusted the clasp, maybe added a tag with a phone number — probably have no idea where their dogs went. That wrong does not get resolved by a shelter placement.

But there is something worth holding in the image: three dogs arriving at a slaughterhouse still wearing the marks of their domestic lives. Not strays without histories. Animals with names someone gave them, now being held in a clinic, being vaccinated, starting over. The collars survived the journey from family life through the worst of it and back into human hands. They carried proof of what had been lost.

The slaughterhouse that opened in 2007 will not supply the June 20 festival. Nine dogs are in recovery. And Yulin now has one precedent that did not require force to achieve — a small but real thing for the organizations that will use it the next time they ask a business to close.