Editorial | Pet smugglers are motivated by greed
- Owners may be tempted to bypass the cost and bureaucracy of border controls but illegal operators are only interested in money and will likely sacrifice the welfare of the animals to save their own skin
Covid-19 and anti-contagion curbs on normal life may have been globally bad for business, but they also created business opportunities.
Some are shining examples of free-market supply and demand, such as ramped up production of face masks and hand sanitiser. Others, sadly, reflect a less attractive side of human nature.
One is the smuggling of dogs and cats, in which the unscrupulous traffickers exploit the close relationship between humans and pets for profit when they are separated by travel during the pandemic.
This can have tragic consequences, to which the city was alerted by the discovery of three dead microchipped dogs and 12 dead cats in separate cages on beaches at Stanley and Lamma Island.
Authorities assume they were thrown or lost overboard during a police chase when they were being smuggled to the mainland. A couple of days later police and agricultural officials rescued 22 dogs and 26 cats, believed to be destined for the mainland, from a Tuen Mun pet hotel.
04:08
Partners in crime: Dog in China helps girl keep a lookout so she can watch TV
The raid was prompted by about 20 complaints from pet owners after animals went missing. The SPCA said some rescued pets were covered in excrement or trapped in cages. The officers were investigating an illegal operation that used the city as a base from which to transport the pets of people returning to the mainland.