Dog with 1.5m followers stolen, sold and eaten in restaurant

This is the shocking moment a dog was allegedly stolen before being sold for meat and served to customers in a restaurant. Chutou, a beautiful Border Collie, was an influencer dog in China with an online following of around 1.5 million.

His owner, Guo, had been posting content about his dog on Douyin – the Chinese equivalent of TikTok – before setting off on a solo trip abroad, meaning he couldn’t take his furry companion with him. While he was away, he sent Chutou to stay with his parents, but on May 11 received a message that the dog had gone missing. CCTV footage appeared to show the moment when a pair of suspected thieves grabbed Chutou before escaping on an electric scooter. After his father told him the dog was missing, Guo cut his trip short and managed to track down one of the people said to have committed the crime.

Confronting the man, the dog owner learned that his furry friend had been sold to a dog meat restaurant for 180 yuan (£20).

Chutou had since been butchered, served in the restaurant and eaten by customers, with the rest of the dog’s remains discarded, leaving nothing for Guo to remember his dog by.

According to the South China Morning Post, the alleged thief who had been spotted on CCTV told Guo: “The dog is dead, so stop making a fuss. I did not break the law.”

The alleged thief reportedly asserted that he had mistaken Chutou for a stray dog, a claim Guo refused to accept, as the dog wore a collar and a GPS tracker. When he went to the restaurant, they told him anything left of his dog had been “thrown in the rubbish long ago”.

“I’m sorry, Chutou,” he said in one video. “I can’t forgive myself, and I can’t forgive the thieves.”

He is reportedly pursuing legal action against the thief. The Ningling County Public Security Bureau in Shangqiu, Henan province, has opened a case looking into allegations of kidnapping a dog, and investigations are ongoing, reported AsiaOne.

Though slowly dying out, the consumption of dog meat is still practised in some parts of China, including rural areas such as Hunan and Guangxi. Like pigs and oxen, dogs were domesticated in China during the Stone Age and served as a historical source of protein. Each June, the 10-day Dog Meat Festival, also known as the Yulin Dog Meat Festival, takes place in Yulin, Guangxi, during which thousands of dogs are consumed. The festival organisers claim that the dogs are killed humanely, but animal rights activists and campaigners claim that the animals are treated cruelly.

The practice is, however, now largely condemned by younger generations in China’s more urban areas.