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China’s annual upcoming Yulin Dog Meat Festival is just a few months away. The stars of this “festival” are domesticated pets — eager to please, loyal, and trusting to a fault.

But instead of receiving love and safety in return, they’re tortured, stuffed into tiny cages, and paraded through crowded, noisy streets. Frightened and disoriented, they smell the cooking flesh of other dogs, hear their screams, and then feel the agony of cleavers severing their limbs. Many are skinned alive.

They are the thousands of dogs and puppies — and hundreds of cats and kittens — who are beaten and butchered annually as part of a grotesque summer solstice dog meat “celebration” in Yulin, China, scheduled this year for June 21.

At North Shore Animal League America, they’ve rescued dogs and puppies from this savagery. They’ve soothed their scars, tended to their wounds and made their damaged spirits whole.

But now, as the 2017 “festival” approaches, we all must do more. So please, stand with us for those animals — the helpless dogs and cats of Yulin — because they too are our responsibility, as are the more than 10 million dogs and cats slaughtered and eaten every year throughout China.

You have a voice. Together we can end the Chinese dog meat industry once and for all.

Click here to join Beth in signing the petition North Shore Animal League put together to stop this horror.