Vengeful pet owner kills dog hunter by ramming him through wall with van

‘If you try to chase me, I’ll poison you with a dart,’ the dog thief had warned the man after shooting his pet

A man from the Jiangsu city of Yangzhou has been detained by police after turning vigilante last week and slamming the guy who stole and killed his dog through a wall with his van.

According to eyewitness reports, the 40-year-old dog owner rushed outside after hearing his dog in distress, finding that a man had shot his pet with a poison dart and was now making off with it. When he tried to confront the dog hunter, the criminal warned him not to try and follow him. “If you dare to chase me, I’ll poison you with a dart,” he threatened before driving off on a motorcycle.

The dog owner, surnamed Fan, was apparently not intimidated by this threat and quickly jumped in his van and sped off after the dog thief. Surveillance camera footage from outside of a roadside gas station then shows the van ploughing forward at full speed, apparently out of control, with the dog hunter and his motorcycle caught on the fender, smashing straight through a pillar on the sidewalk before crashing into the side of the shop.

The suspected dog thief, a 42-year-old man surnamed Luo, was declared dead at the scene. Also found were six dog carcasses stuffed inside black bags. Afterward, Fan was taken in for questioning by police. The case is still under investigation and it’s not clear when he will go to trial.

His family has claimed that Fan merely meant to frighten the dog thief — not ram him through a pillar and wall — but had simply got the gas pedal confused with the brake pedal in the heat of the moment.

A similar incident occurred in September of last year when a restaurant owner in Hubei’s Yichang city was chased down and run off the road by a vengeful pet owner. The restaurant owner was not killed in the crash and later turned himself in to police, admitting that he had been hunting neighborhood dogs with a crossbow for use in his specialty dog meat hot pot. When officers inspected his car, they found his trunk and backseat lined with eight dog carcasses.

But this is also far from the first time that the illegal business of poisoning dogs has resulted in human casualties. Back in 2012, an animal-lover who stepped in to stop a dog-meat dealer became the target of a poisoned needle. Two years later, a Guangdong dog-poisoner was arrested after getting into a scuffle with a local villager and killing the man with one of the toxic syringes he had on hand. That same year, in Shanghai, a man strangled a dog thief to death after discovering this his pet had been poisoned.

The needles have also proved to be a direct danger to the poisoners themselves. In 2015, a dog meat vendor in Hunan province accidentally shot himself with one of his toxic darts, resulting in his death.

Such darts are terrifyingly numerous in China. Last month, Chinese police busted a gang for selling 200,000 poison darts to unscrupulous restaurant owners who used them to gather up food for their eateries in the form of unfortunate canines.

[Images via Legal Evening News / Pear Video]