SEE IT: Man rescues 1,000 dogs from China’s controversial dog meat festival

The controversial 10-day dog meat festival in China is underway and Marc Ching isn’t going to stand by and watch.

The American activist announced Tuesday that he rescued 1,000 dogs from slaughterhouses, while providing a slew of emotional videos from his findings at the annual event which takes place in Yulin, in southern China.

Many of the the dogs are believed to have been pets that were stolen off the street.

As many as 10,000 dogs are expected to be killed during the 10-day festival, according to The Associated Press.

But Ching and Valarie Ianniello, who had traveled to Yulin before the event, freed 1,000 of them from six slaughterhouses around the country.

“A thousand breaths that would die here in the dark. A thousand lives that would bleed like blood left there upon ground,” Ching wrote on the Animal Hope & Wellness Foundation Facebook on Tuesday.

“These dogs, they are brothers. They are sisters. They are fathers and mothers. They are children. They deserve a chance.

Ching, who has been beaten up, shot at, hospitalized and almost died, like, four times during his seven rescue trips to Asia, called the festival a frontal assault.

In other trips, he’s gone undercover as a dog-meat buyer and recorded the torture at the slaughterhouses.

He's seen dogs burned alive with blowtorches, scalded to death in boiling water and beaten with bats while they hung from their necks, he told LA Weekly.

At one of the slaughterhouses he shut down on this trip, where they kill between 20 and 60 dogs every day, Ching said he promised the owner that he would help him start a vegetarian noodle restaurant in exchange.

“There's this moment where you come into the slaughterhouse and the dogs are screaming, and when you rescue them they know who you are,” Ching told the magazine. “And it's the most beautiful thing ever. That moment's actually pretty addicting.”

A note from my son:

Yeah, I heard about this. There are two main thoughts I have, 1. All biological, archaeological, and anthropological knowledge agrees that domestic dogs are genetically distinct from wild dogs; that they are a species which has basically been genetically engineered, by humans, to be companions, and throughout the history of human civilization have lived alongside humans as companions. Unlike, say, chickens, which have been genetically engineered to be livestock, raised for the purpose of eating. So, I think no cultural relativism is acceptable in this case - they are not a source of food, not according to how we've bred them over the generations - humans have made dogs into what they are, animals that are dependent on humans and loyal to humans, and we have a particular responsibility to honor that. 2. My impression is that dog meat eating is generally unpopular in Asia, in the countries where it exists(I've never heard of it in Japan, though, but that's one of many reasons why I respect that culture.) The majority of people, in any part of the world, can recognize the loyalty that dogs have for humans, and are upset by this sort of thing. For example, the Vietnamese I've talked to have pet dogs. Eating dogs is looked down upon, and it's mostly homeless drunks who capture wild dogs or try to steal pet dogs to eat them. So, I think the behavior exists only as a consequence of extreme poverty and desperation, and will become more rare and eventually eliminated over time.

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