Day 6 (MONDAY APRIL 22ND 2013)

Three Birds Trading Market, Nanhai

We wander the area surrounding the market during the morning and find, to our surprise, around twelve crushed kittens. Some have been crushed with such force it is hard to recognize them. We deduce that these kittens were born in the cages that their mothers were being transported in inside the trucks and that they died that same afternoon when they were thrown against the ground. Other cages, loaded with other cats probably fell on top of them. We found this in two zones. When we film at the new Three Birds Market entrance, two guards on motorcycles approach us. They try to intimidate us to get us to stop recording but we know they have no authority so we ignore them and they finally leave.

A few hours later we return to the zone and watch the market for three hours. Around seven o’clock that evening we observe a medium sized truck loaded with rabbits that stops near the market’s secondary entrance, under a highway bridge. Posted about 100 meters away and thanks to our camera’s zoom, we are able to discover that these transporters are carrying more than a hundred dogs in their truck, hidden among the rabbit cages. For a few minutes, we film how they throw the cages from the top of the truck before we decide to approach them. We walk up to the highway and, crouching, manage to position ourselves right over them without being seen. We start filming and taking photographs of how the animals are unloaded while barely managing to look through the viewfinder in order to avoid being discovered. The animals, crowded in the cages, are terrified and can barely move. Due to the size of the cages, they have to stay lying down the entire time as they are being thrown from the truck against the floor. We can hear the dogs’ cries of pain when they hit the ground. They cry out from broken bones, concussions, and open wounds… Once they are on the ground, they are piled up, weighed and transferred onto another truck that we think will take them to the slaughterhouses in the zone.

After filming for almost twenty minutes, the transporters realize…