Ten hours of travel. Sealed sacks, snouts tied with ropes and wires, with no water or air. That is how activists found dozens of dogs inside a truck intercepted in Indonesia, minutes before it reached an illegal slaughterhouse.
Some had already stopped moving. Others trembled silently, pressed against one another as if that could protect them. And amid so many sacks, something broke the rescuers’ hearts: several of those dogs were still wearing collars. They weren’t strays. They were stolen pets from someone’s yard, someone’s bed, some family that still doesn’t know what happened to them.
At the place they were headed, according to animal welfare organizations, around 30 dogs a day are beaten to death to sell their meat. The driver was arrested, but the business behind these trucks continues to operate in different provinces across the country, where the sale of dog meat is still not prohibited nationwide. The rescued dogs are now starting from scratch, far from the terror, waiting for a second chance that almost never came.