Why Hong Kong dog shelters are struggling to survive
Across the city, cash-strapped and overwhelmed refuges are desperately trying to find loving homes for abandoned and ill-treated canines
Mad Girl hasn’t felt sunshine on her face for five years. It might be longer, nobody really knows. Time moves slowly here, one day stretches into the next, and the scenery never changes.
A black and brown Shar Pei cross, Mad Girl – perhaps her name is ironic – stays huddled in a corner of a cage lined with plastic flooring, a few thin blankets for comfort. This is how she spends her days, interacting occasionally, distractedly, with her companion dogs in the room housing her pen, one of several that usually have open doors. But Mad Girl shows signs of keener engagement with the world when she and her friends have visitors, of which there are few. She stands slowly and is initially uncertain, ears lowered in fear. Then she relaxes, wags her tail joyously and cuddles up, desperate for affection.
Mad Girl is not a patient and she’s not a prisoner; she’s not even a statistic, because nobody is counting. She’s a rescued but forgotten resident of a shelter occupying a former pig farm in the shadow of Shek Kong Airfield, in the New Territories. Mad Girl, taken in by a horrified animal-lover who witnessed her suffer repeated beatings at the hands of her former owner, is a Hong Kong dog.
There’s no cheery neon sign, no tinkling forecourt fountain or welcoming front office to announce the property. It’s almost as if it doesn’t want to be found – which is partly true, given the numbers of dogs that Kwok has had dumped on its doorstep in its 11 years.
As the sprawl of Pat Heung fades in the rear-view mirror, and the motorway gives way to a minor road, then a single-lane road, then a dusty village lane and, eventually, a potholed track, the realisation is that any dog that finds a “temporary” home at the shelter is likely to be there for tedious, meaningless life.