Jeffrey Beri arrived in Guangzhou near the end of April and spent two weeks quarantined in a hotel. A few times a day, officials in hazmat suits came to check on him. He watched television news and stewed over what he perceived to be Communist Party propaganda and a crackdown that China was launching on pet dogs.
“You just want to throat-punch everyone on TV,” he told me by phone, half whispering, certain that the room was bugged. “You feel like a caged animal, watching your kids get slaughtered.”
By kids, he meant dogs, the ones he couldn’t save from the Chinese meat market while he languished in quarantine. Beri, a fifty-six-year-old former jewelry designer, is a co-founder of an organization called No Dogs Left Behind, which rescues dogs in East Asia and arranges for their adoption in North America. In 2014, after watching an anti-animal-agriculture documentary called “Cowspiracy,” he sold his jewelry company and dedicated his life to animal welfare. In the spring of 2016, he went to China and had his first encounters with the dog-meat trade and the rescue game.
Each year, in the city of Yulin, in Guangxi, scores of dogs are killed for food, in what Westerners call the Yulin Dog Meat Festival. This spectacle, which lasts ten days, around the summer solstice, is no longer sanctioned by the local government, but it hasn’t been shut down. In recent years, the festival has attracted a migration of animal-rights activists, among them Beri and N.D.L.B., who identify slaughterhouses and, with or without the help of the authorities, attempt to take the dogs. They also intercept trucks loaded with dogs, which are often crammed, several at a time, into chicken cages. Filthy, malnourished, traumatized, and diseased, the dogs have been picked up on the street or bought or stolen from their owners. As a result, the traffickers usually lack the required paperwork and are obliged to surrender the dogs to the police, who have nowhere to place them, and often would just as soon not deal with them. The situation gives the activists the pretext to take the dogs and transfer them to shelters they have established around the country, where they can, at least in theory, treat, vaccinate, and sterilize them, before seeking new homes for them in China or overseas.
The dog rescuers, in their promotional videos, depict their operations as commando raids. Beri deploys a security detail, burner phones, and decoy trucks, and owing to his intensity both of feeling and of activity—climbing a tree to jury-rig tarps, ignoring bite wounds and scratches, directing a clandestine nighttime truck-stop transfer of confiscated cargo—he has come to be known, by his Chinese counterparts, as the General; other activists call him Dog Rambo Jesus.
No Dogs Left Behind, in its communications, cultivates an atmosphere of emergency and apocalyptic canicide. In May, it circulated a call to arms on social media (“We fight the fight on the front lines!”) with the word “Yulin” in red and an image of a bloody carving knife. Videos of horrors make the rounds: dogs being tortured, or blowtorched, or boiled alive. These drum up international rage, and donations.
Ten years ago, the journal Anthrozoös published a study of sixty societies. In fewer than half were dogs considered pets, and even pet dogs were, in most cultures, kept around for practical reasons: guarding, herding, hunting. In only seven were dogs fed and sheltered inside the home, and in only three did people play with their dogs. “Cultural differences and historical changes in patterns of pet-keeping . . . do not support the idea that love for animals is a hard-wired human trait,” Harold Herzog, a psychology professor at Western Carolina University, concluded, seven years ago, in the journal Animal Behavior and Cognition.
By most accounts, dogs in China are not cultivated strictly for food, though there are still dog-meat restaurants in many cities. In Wuhan, dog-meat soup is said to ward off disease. There is no law protecting the rights of domestic animals or prohibiting the sale of dog meat. Household dogs and cats tend to roam freely, without having been fixed. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao disdained dogs as a bourgeois indulgence, and even in 2014 the People’s Daily was calling dog ownership a harbinger of “the Western wind.” Still, Western-style pet ownership is on the rise, especially with the younger generations, who are driving much of the activism against animal cruelty. Peter Li, a professor at the University of Houston-Downtown, who researches animal rights in China, told me, “The bond between humans and dogs is transcultural. It’s false that Chinese don’t like dogs. My family had a dog before I was born. We were in a rural area. One day, the dog disappeared. This was during famine in the early sixties. Later, I begged my mother for a puppy. She always said no. The family was traumatized once, and didn’t want to go through it again.”
A recent outrage of the pandemic era (and a new instance of West condemning East) involves the so-called blind-box craze, in which e-commerce customers in China have been receiving, as a surprise, gifts of puppies, kittens, or hamsters in the mail—many of them dead on arrival.
Some dead animals we eat, others we mourn. No creature on the planet kills or coddles other species the way humans do. The scenario of a global pandemic erupting from a wet market—from exotic carcasses in dubious circumstances—clarifies the mind, no matter the viability of the lab-leak hypothesis. Animals, or, really, our mishandling of them, may well have got us into this mess, and in many ways we have been relying on them to get us through it. Our fraught relationship with the beasts under our dominion may make us the most exotic animal of all.
No matter how you run the numbers, pet adoption became an obsession in the time of covid. A story line emerged that people, confined to their homes, deprived of contact with the outside world, and often suffering emotional or psychological distress, were adopting more pets than usual—another boom, along with sourdough baking and butt implants.
Doodles bounded in. Veterinarians were slammed. The vet network BluePearl, which is owned by Mars (whose pet-care business dwarfs its candy business), reported that visits were up more than twenty per cent in 2020—and that more than half of them were from new patients. Vets, eager for more space, became an unlikely engine in the sputtering commercial-real-estate market.
Kate Perry, a trainer and the co-author of “Training for Both Ends of the Leash,” said, “In my world, it’s puppies, puppies, rescues, rescues, more puppies. Everyone was desperate at the same time.” Petco’s sales rose by eleven per cent, Chewy’s by forty-seven per cent, and Morgan Stanley has predicted that the pet-care industry will almost triple in size in the next decade. (It should surprise no one that private equity is horning in.) A recent survey found that three out of four American millennials own a pet, a fashionable generalization being that since they can’t afford to buy homes and don’t want kids, they are nesting instead with their “fur babies.” Little dogs in bags and strollers, on laps at restaurants, in funny hats and sweaters. A bull terrier blows by in an Adidas tracksuit: Spuds gone chav. Some people seem to privilege pets over spawn. Perry said she was teaching courses in “how to detach from your dog and prioritize your baby.”
Social feeds, doom aside, became a balmy menagerie of influencer pugs and let’s-all-make-one-another-feel-better terriers and mutts. Some people were using their animals as magnets for likes or even as entrepreneurial fodder. Others just wanted to spread the cute. Bunny, the talking sheepadoodle, has 6.7 million followers on TikTok. Happiness is a warm jpeg. A tweet, from the writer Sarah Miller: “Someone was just complaining about the whole ‘I’m sad show me your pets’ routine . . . and this made me sad so . . . I’m afraid . . . I need to see . . . your pets!”
Fashionable breeds, their value rising amid sudden demand, turned up in the crime blotter. In December, a man from Cameroon was arrested in Romania for catfishing Americans out of thousands of dollars for phantom miniature dachshunds and teacup Chihuahuas. The prosecutor, a U.S. Attorney in Pennsylvania, felt compelled to state, “The desire for companionship [is] higher than ever.” In February, on a quiet residential street in Hollywood, three men stole two French bulldogs belonging to Lady Gaga, and shot the dog-walker. Gaga offered half a million dollars for their safe return, and soon enough a woman came forward, claiming to have found them, only to be charged not long afterward as the thieves’ accessory—companionship of another kind.
The numbers only sometimes support the narrative. Although dognapping appears to be up, pet adoption is not, according to animal-welfare groups. The pandemic pet boom seems mainly to be one of increasing attention—and perhaps a deficit in other social and cultural pursuits. Andrew Rowan, a former president of Humane Society International and now the head of WellBeing International, an animal-advocacy group outside Washington, D.C., has been on a one-man mission to set humans straight. In a thousand shelters and rescues nationwide (representing a fifth of all animals handled), adoptions actually dropped by about twenty per cent in 2020. It’s possible, but unlikely, that people compensated for that decrease by getting more dogs from breeders, or from pet shops, which are supplied by puppy mills. (The Amish notoriously maintain big operations that essentially raise dogs as livestock.)
So where did this idea of a pet boom come from? The number of dogs admitted to shelters declined by more than the outflow did. It became harder to get a dog, or at least the dog you wanted. The shelters thinned out; the waiting lists filled up. “The dog supply is very tight,” Rowan said. “Even in the shelters in the South, the supply is dropping. Virginia has gone from being a net exporter of dogs to a net importer, in the last four years. What you’ll likely see is puppy prices increasing.”
Rowan calculates that there are approximately eighty million dogs in the U.S., a number that goes up by about a million every year. The number of strays is only about one per cent of the total. In 2019, before the pandemic, shelters took in four million dogs. More than half a million were euthanized. We used to have fewer dogs and kill a lot more of them. In 1973, when the dog population was less than half what it is today, seven million dogs were euthanized. 1973, as it happens, was a year of pet crisis. With New York City a turd minefield, the media took up the theme of overpopulation. “Thousands of unwanted pets roam the countryside, feeding on small farm animals and wildlife,” the Times reported. “They inhabit the empty lots of cities, coming out of abandoned buildings to pick through heaps of garbage. . . . Frightened residents, particularly in slum areas, report packs of wild dogs terrorizing their children.” The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Humane Society, and other groups responded by pushing harder for sterilization—a “planned parenthood for pets.” In 1970 in Los Angeles, for example, just ten per cent of licensed dogs were sterilized. By 1975, it was fifty per cent. Now that share is more than ninety-five per cent. Micky Niego, a behavior counsellor in Rockland County, helped transform the animal-adoption apparatus in New York City in the early eighties, as a kind of matchmaker. “The A.S.P.C.A. was a kill shelter,” she said. “They had the contract. It was the garbage can of New York City.” She facilitated adoptions by getting a clearer profile of dogs and of humans. She says that shelters have got much better at finding homes for dogs and at treating them humanely, but then again, she told me, “maybe there’s no hope for dogs, because look at what people do to their children and their wives.”
Pandemic life has shrunk our horizons, narrowed our focus. For many, the cat was the only companion, and the dog walk, if you even bothered, became the only trip outside, the rare encounter with strangers. Home alone with their animals, people paid them closer attention. Helicopter petting: they fixate on every lump or limp, to say nothing of the hour-to-hour mood swings.
“Usually when you’re at work, you don’t see what your dog does all day,” Perry said. “Now it’s ‘I didn’t know you did that all day.’ ” Scratch, whine, howl: “A big thing is the triggered barking. The sliding of boxes across a hallway floor, in apartment buildings. The distribution of the packages. The UPS guy.”
There’s a lot of talk of a looming separation-anxiety crisis, as unsocialized, spoiled hounds encounter a new era, in which the humans go through the door thing to earn the bread that pays for the kibble. Andrea Tu is a behavior veterinarian in Manhattan, which makes her the equivalent of a psychiatrist: she can prescribe medications, including, but not limited to, popular S.S.R.I.s such as Reconcile (doggy Prozac), sertraline, and paroxetine, as well as a range of fast-acting basics like trazodone, gabapentin, clonidine, and various common benzodiazepines. “We’re looking at three-month waits,” she said. “We’re seeing a ton of cases where people are in over their heads. Now they can’t leave the dog alone for ten minutes, much less for ten hours.” Many vets are concerned that shelters may begin filling up again.
Cats, meanwhile, are often disturbed by not being left alone. “They’re not used to having to share space with people all the time,” Tu said. “We’re seeing a lot of stress-induced cystitis—cats getting U.T.I.s, basically, when they’re stressed.”
I’m a dog person. My childhood diary, abandoned after a few weeks, was a chronicle of the family Norfolk terrier, who had one testicle and the soul of a poet. Eight years ago, my wife, my sons, and I adopted a mutt allegedly from Tuscaloosa, Alabama—mostly black, long-haired, about fifty pounds, a herder with a retriever’s webbed paws. The boys, who were ten and eight at the time, chose him from an ever-shifting array on Petfinder, and changed his name from Zayn (the shelter apparently employed a One Direction stan) to Kiekko (which, according to their research, is Finnish for “puck”). He came north in a truck that was bound for a shelter in New Hampshire and disembarked at the Vince Lombardi Service Area, on the New Jersey Turnpike. We took him home to our apartment and surrendered very quickly to the premise that he was a member of the family.
Who knows what Kiekko was thinking? We often tried to imagine it by anthropomorphizing, pooch-talking, speech-bubbling. Kate Perry, the trainer, classifies four “canine-ality” types: the workaholic, the sensitive artist, the methodical thinker, and the party animal. It seemed to us that Kiekko could be any or all, as of course could we. We bathed and brushed him, plied him with rawhide and Greenies, invited him onto our bed, and also occasionally called him a crackhead, for his single-minded huffing for scraps. Such hunger. You’d think we weren’t feeding him. When neighbors, making elevator talk, remarked that he looked heavier, we took offense. It’s the undercoat. Our younger son, a mischievous live wire, had been getting in some trouble at school, and the dog mellowed him out: petamorphosis. But Kiekko was himself a bit of a shit-stirrer. He menaced people carrying tools, men with odd gaits or hats or uniforms or floppy shoes. He stole sandwiches out of the hands of small children. One Thanksgiving, a thud from the kitchen announced that he’d wrestled a carved turkey to the floor.
We walk him at the north end of Central Park. Before we adopted him, I had considered the dog people in the Park to be kind of nuts. Once we had him, I got to know how. Before 9 a.m., in parts of the Park, dogs are allowed off leash—a nice libertarian touch, in a jaywalking town. There are a lot of dogs out there in the morning, doing dog things, while their humans do their dog-human things: the scofflaws, the hall monitors, the ladies with the slobber-stained pockets full of treats, the shambling elders in dog-safari vests stocked with accoutrements. The dogless must doggedly pick their way through. We fell in with a group who got dogs around the same time we did. Behavioral noninterventionists, mostly, we congregated around a bench that now bears a small plaque with the names of an older couple who own a collie-husky mix that, for a while anyway, Kiekko, a gelding since Alabama, felt compelled to mount. For a few years, we all talked about having dinner together sometime, but by now it’s obvious that we won’t. As it stands, we see one another more often—and tell one another more about ourselves—than we do anyone else.
Over the years, I’ve had some run-ins. There was the unhappy gent, a ringer for Van Morrison, who often stood near the 103rd Street transverse, with what seemed to be a dire wolf on a rope, and yelled at anyone who allowed an unleashed dog to come near. One fine April morning, by the Park’s mulch depot, Kiekko wandered over, and Van Morrison barked at my wife, “Fuck you!” She blurted back, “Happy Easter!” There was also the aardvark of a man with a pair of enviable dachshunds who, after Kiekko had run up on him too aggressively, shouted at me, from six feet away, “You’re an asshole!” He might have been onto something. Or else he was projecting. Happy Easter.
A pet, you could say, is an animal that lives in the home and has a name, and that you don’t eat. People dine on rabbit but generally not on the pet rabbit. One of the earliest uses of the term “pet,” five centuries ago, described a lamb that was raised by hand and kept as a favorite; it’s hard to imagine that such a creature didn’t become food, and that someone in the household didn’t become sad. Over time, sentiment evolved. A University of Denver history professor named Ingrid Tague did a survey of pet elegies in eighteenth-century England, finding the incidence, even then, of deep mourning, snickering double-entendre, and totemic carpe diem, such as “On a Favourite Thrush, That Was Killed by Accident” and “On the Premature Death of Cloe Snappum, a Lady’s Favourite Lap-Dog,” whose fur, postmortem, was apparently converted into a muff:
The rise of dog breeding, in nineteenth-century England—with its emphasis on purity over purpose, and its echo of eugenics—ushered in a more intentional age. Here was something we could design, rather than merely tame and train.
The Harvard literature professor Marc Shell, in a 1986 essay titled “The Family Pet,” explored the exceptional status of the pet, as something half man and half beast. Gesturing to Genesis, the Eucharist, Freud, and Penthouse, he performs some rhetorical twirls, of questionable sincerity, in order to equate pet ownership with incest, bestiality, and cannibalism, and to call attention to the peerless anthropocentrism of Christianity: “If one wishes to avoid or sublimate both literal bestiality and literal incest—as who does not?—one way to do so would be to seek out a ‘snugglepup.’ ” The word “puppy” may derive from poupée, the French word for a doll (from the Latin pupa); it made the leap to canines in their incarnations as lap accessories for the women of the aristocracy. “Puppy” sounds playful enough, but, in light of its origin, also a little creepy, suggesting that the pet remains in some respects inanimate in the absence of its owner’s projections.
With the right kind of distance—a brain on science fiction, or a sativa gummy—one can start to feel a little queasy about the leashes and collars, the tugging and heeling, the sudden bursts of anger and reproach. This institution of cuddliness contains a trace of tyranny. Out of nowhere, a Park Avenue matron woofs an angry “No!” like Caesar in “Planet of the Apes.” The other day, I saw a middle-aged man sling a leashed corgi toward the curb and grab it by the scruff, the dog squealing as the man roared; apparently, the dog had got hold of a bread crust or a tasty turd. Why you so mad? If it had been a son, I might have called child services. I also saw a woman chide a doodle for sprawling on its back in the dirt, legs splayed: “That’s not very ladylike!” Nor is allowing an animal to lick your face; no one, or let’s say few, would tolerate such a thing from a fellow-human.
“We added dogs to our lives before we figured out how to get the food we need and what to do with all the shit we produce ourselves,” Alexandra Horowitz, a senior research fellow at Barnard who studies dog cognition, told me. “It’s like we didn’t think ahead.”
Legally and practically, as Horowitz observes in her 2019 book, “Our Dogs, Ourselves,” pets are property. Humans buy them, collar and leash them, cut off their tails and ears, govern their sex lives, yet consider them family members. We buy them beds and toys, and forgive them their trespasses, even as we grumble about other people’s dogs—O.P.D.s—the way we do about other people’s children. Dog owners will sometimes tell you they love their Maxes and Bellas (the most popular dog names nationwide, according to one survey, though it’s Murphy in Vermont and Sadie in Delaware) more than the people in their lives. Some humans evince discomfort with the arrangement; they won’t call themselves “owners.” Petco opts for “parents.” In Boulder, Colorado, it’s “guardians.”
“We like the dogs that look like us, or our conception of ourselves,” Horowitz said. “It’s so easy for people now to get the dog with the specs and features they want. It’s weird that you can shop for an animal by plugging in your variables and then just clicking on the dog. It’s pretty dystopian—for animals.”
“Shelter” dogs have become “rescue” dogs, perhaps the better to signal the hound’s plight, and the human’s virtue. “The way our parents dealt with dogs is different from the way we do, and I suspect it will be different for our kids,” Horowitz said. “Maybe ownership will be regulated, or forbidden, a remnant of a bygone idea.” We are already creating breeds of dogs that can be left inside, engineered for the wee-wee pad, segregated from the natural world, like succulents on a windowsill. One imagines robot dogs, like ’Lectronimo in “The Jetsons,” or shareable pets—Zipcat. “It’s entirely possible that in a hundred and fifty years we won’t be owning dogs at all,” Horowitz said.
Tony Pagano, who is fifty-eight, grew up on an apple farm in Ulster County, surrounded by huskies and strays; when he was a teen-ager, his father, who ran a construction union, got him work on big demolition jobs. For decades, he has had his own construction company and has built out law firms, restaurants, the headquarters of the N.B.A. and the N.H.L., and, after September 11th, a replica of the New York Mercantile Exchange, in a defunct airplane hangar on Long Island, to be deployed in the event of the destruction of the one in Manhattan. Plugged in with New York Republicans, Pagano has countless stories of his wranglings with the city’s power brokers. One, about a big-deal lawyer, begins, “That individual that fucked me . . .”
Pagano’s wife’s family is from Puerto Rico. Visiting the island, he noticed all the “sato” dogs, the stray mutts that wander the streets and beaches. There are some five hundred thousand strays in Puerto Rico. Pagano owns a logistics company, called Globalink Worldwide Express, and he started arranging to pick up sato rescues who were arriving on flights from the Caribbean to New York City. At times, there were dogs coming in every night. He fostered some himself and tapped into other foster and adoption networks. Engine 14, the fire station down the street from his apartment, near Union Square, adopted a pit bull, but Pagano, having fallen in love with it, took it back—a so-called foster fail.
In 2017, a staff member from No Dogs Left Behind, familiar with Pagano’s Puerto Rico work, asked him for logistical help. Pagano went out to J.F.K. to meet Jeff Beri, who was arriving on an Aeroflot flight from Moscow with nine dogs. At the time, Beri was flying dogs as excess baggage. “Here comes this guy passing out twenty-dollar bills to the skycaps like it’s candy,” Pagano said, of Beri. “He had nine dogs. Each one had its own cart. I was, like, ‘I can’t believe this shit!’ I offered to take over the operation from there.”
Pagano refers to himself as N.D.L.B.’s director of global logistics. He’s a licensed pilot (“I can fly jets, but I don’t fly the big tin”), and has connections at the carriers (“American Airlines loves me”) and the airports (“I’m tight with one of the union reps for the airport police at LAX”), and so has been instrumental in getting pallets of Chinese rescue dogs to the U.S. “The dogs fly in my name,” Pagano said. “I’m on the A.W.B.—the master air waybill. I’m there on the loading dock at the cargo terminal. I’m the one handling the dogs, and they are a constant reminder why we give a shit.”
One morning, shortly before Beri left for his latest trip to China, Pagano and I drove out to Jersey City to meet him. He was holed up at N.D.L.B.’s new “base station,” as Pagano called it, in a modest vinyl-sided house in the Heights section owned by an activist who helps direct N.D.L.B.’s operations. Pagano called Beri on his phone to tell him we’d arrived. “I’m still in bed,” Beri said.
“He works through the night,” Pagano explained. “China is twelve hours ahead.”
We waited outside for Beri to shower and dress. A tall young man named Ian McMath joined us on the porch. He had on black jeans and a black jean jacket emblazoned with N.D.L.B. slogans. McMath, a rock musician and a filmmaker from Arkansas, had been living for years in Beijing when a friend recruited him to do some work on behalf of the animal rescuer Marc Ching, who, according to McMath, wanted incriminating footage of Beri, in order to discredit him. “Jeff has a lot of adversaries,” McMath said. “There are a lot of competitive and egocentric operators.” Ching, who had solicited the support of Hollywood figures such as Matt Damon and Joaquin Phoenix, has been accused by the Los Angeles Times of, among other things, paying butchers in Indonesia to blowtorch a dog to death on camera—effectively perpetrating the horrors he was purporting to protest. Ching denied these charges, blaming them on rival rescuers, and told the Times that “groups slander each other constantly.” (Ching is also facing criminal charges for making fraudulent claims about a pet-products business he runs, the Petstaurant. Pretrial hearings are this week.) He didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“He’s a very nefarious individual,” Pagano said. “He was using Yulin to get famous.”
“That guy hired my friend, who sent me out to do a hit on Jeff,” McMath said. After seeing Beri in action, he switched sides, and became his primary videographer: “I’m like a propaganda lieutenant.”
Beri greeted us at the top of the stairs. Thickset, with dark hair and some stubble, sockless in gym slides, he was dressed, like McMath, in N.D.L.B. merch. His T-shirt bore the dates and locations of rescue operations in China, as though recounting a concert tour. (His Budokan: June, 2019, Guangzhou, thirteen hundred dogs.) The house had been freshly renovated. There was one room for six dogs, carpeted with fake turf, another for computer servers and film equipment, and a bedroom for passers-through like Beri. In a conference room, with four analog clocks on the wall set to different time zones, a giant TV was tuned to Bloomberg News, on mute, and classic rock played loud. McMath seemed to be filming us.
Beri began enumerating canine horrors, amid a confusion of places and dates. I mentioned that I’d been deeply upset by a video that Pagano had shown me of a golden retriever being blowtorched alive. “I hate people,” Beri said. “It’s hard for me to be in public. I suffer panic attacks, anxiety.”
Beri was born in Rego Park, Queens, and grew up on Long Island. His parents, from Hungary, were Holocaust survivors. They always had dogs. Beri studied jewelry design and engineering in Budapest and then became a master jeweller. For a decade, he was the director of product manufacturing and quality control at David Yurman. (“He’s a force of nature,” Yurman told me. “He’s like Robin Hood. Sometimes he doesn’t know when enough’s enough. ‘Jeff is manic’ is ‘the sky is blue.’ ”) Beri had been manufacturing jewelry in China for decades but didn’t speak Mandarin or Cantonese. His first dog trip to China was in the spring of 2016, with Marc Ching, with the avowed goal of rescuing ten thousand dogs before the annual Yulin spectacle. But Ching had nowhere to kennel the dogs in China. Beri built out a couple of what he called safe houses in Nanning, about two hours from Yulin.
Beri, citing a legal rift and a subsequent agreement, wouldn’t talk about Ching, and instead told a winding tale: some hundred rescued dogs sequestered in a monastery in Guangxi, where they began to perish in droves, under the indifferent custody of the monks. Beri moved many of the dogs to a boarding facility on top of a mountain, and arranged for the keeper to be paid. When the money was slow to arrive, he became, in his words, “a hostage.” He eventually escaped, with two dogs, fleeing what he called “a posse of thugs” armed with knives.
“That was my introduction to rescue in China,” he said. In 2017, he and a jewelry executive and animal activist on Long Island, Candy Udell, set up their own organization, with some allies in China and in the U.S. “We believe in building armies, not bringing armies,” Beri said. “The Chinese have to fight their battles. I’m one white man.”
He estimated that No Dogs Left Behind had saved “tens of thousands of dogs, directly and indirectly.” And perhaps some other animals, too: N.D.L.B. converts its rescues to a meatless diet. “We don’t believe in rescuing dogs and then killing animals to feed them,” Beri said. A U.C.L.A. study estimated that dogs and cats account for more than a quarter of the environmental impact of the meat consumption in this country. Jiminy’s, a pet-food startup that uses crickets and grubs, has an eco-calculator that estimates a pet’s “carbon pawprint.” Switching Kiekko to bugs would save more than half a million gallons of water a year, and five acres of arable land. It would also double our dog-food bill.
Now and then, Beri smacked my shoe, to emphasize a point. He was drinking a Monster energy drink and getting sweaty. His overarching message was that the mass killing of animals, be they dogs, or chickens, or cattle, is the biggest threat to humankind’s survival on Earth—that, whether this coronavirus emerged from a wet market or a lab, our meat-procurement habits have doomed us to pollution, climate change, and disease. Dogs are just the most emotionally turbulent example. Americans, after all, have their own annual festival of animal carnage, called Thanksgiving. “We believe the reckless slaughtering of animals must come to an end,” he said. “It’s the cause of this pandemic.”
Anticipating some danger on his impending trip to China, he had prepared a will, and handed off the reins of N.D.L.B. to a retired health-care lawyer on Long Island, Jacqueline Finnegan, who had been volunteering for Beri for a couple of years. “I have no choice but to go back,” he said. Owing to covid and political tension, it would be weeks before he’d be allowed into the country.
Peter Li, the professor at the University of Houston-Downtown, has been researching the dog-meat industry for twenty years. “The dog-meat trade, as it is today, emerged in the early eighties, amid the strategy of economic modernization,” he told me. “Dog-meat consumption is supply-driven, not consumer-driven. The traders make their claims: it boosts your sex drive, improves your complexion and general health, and so on. They started the Yulin festival.”
According to Li, the government, while not outlawing the dog-meat trade, has thwarted it. You can’t sell dog meat unless the dog has vaccination records. You can’t process a sick or dying or dead animal for food. When an animal is transported, it must have its own health certificate, from a vet in its place of origin. A truck with five hundred dogs is supposed to have five hundred certificates: good luck with that.
As a result of such measures, along with the work of activists and the raising of awareness among the younger generations, the dog-meat market is in decline. “Maybe it is better to let it die naturally,” Li said. “I did a survey in Guangzhou. Ten years ago, there were two thousand dog-meat restaurants. Five years ago, we found only thirty-six.”
Li admires the passion of activists like Beri, but said, “You can never adopt all the dogs to the West. Better to try to foster a local adoption culture.”
Last month, the Chinese government issued a new decree that any animals to be exported by rescue organizations must first be remanded to a government “breeding facility” for six months. “No reputable rescue would do that,” Jackie Finnegan, of N.D.L.B., told me. “So, in effect, China has stopped the exportation of dogs.” The talk among some in the community was that Beri, with his visibility, wasn’t helping. “Foreign rescuers in China don’t like him,” an American animal activist who has spent time in Wuhan said, of Beri. “He goes to the media, makes a big drama, and it backfires in China.”
“A Caucasian should avoid appearing on the scene at Yulin,” Peter Li said. “Even I, a Chinese-American, would not appear on the scene. The presence of foreign intervention will be used by the traders against the animal-rights movement. The dog-meat industry is already ugly. No need to make it uglier with false claims.” For example, the allegation, which I’d heard repeated by Pagano, Beri, and others, that the slaughterhouses sometimes torture the animals to make the meat taste better. “All this stuff about torching and flaying and boiling alive,” Li said. “I have been in the movement for twenty years, and I’ve never seen those things. I can’t rule it out entirely, but these are not standard industry practices.”
“The powers that be cannot stand him,” Finnegan said, of Beri. “He operates under cover of darkness. He was called in recently by the police for an interrogation.” Beri, on the move, talked to her almost every day, from one of his phones, and appeared in daily videos, on social media, pleading for aid. Some depicted him amid a tumult of rescues; others featured slaughterhouse scenes. “the dogs in the cages know they will die! they see the dead dogs below them. they hear the screams. the chopping.”
Finnegan was back on Long Island, trying to shore up the finances. Last year, N.D.L.B. took in $1.4 million, but this past year the cargo shutdown and the cost of caring for the marooned rescues in China had emptied the coffers. She was also busy reassuring adopters amid their dwindling hopes. Pagano had been stymied in attempts to line up a flight out of China. There were ninety-five dogs that had been adopted and that couldn’t make it out. N.D.L.B.’s sanctuaries in China were full. The adoption fee had more than doubled. A large dog now cost three thousand dollars.
Then, last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, citing the risk of rabies, announced a temporary ban, beginning July 14th, on the import of dogs from more than a hundred countries, including China. “It’s a death sentence to our dogs if we can’t get them out in time,” Pagano said.
Meanwhile, on his way to Yulin, Beri visited Wuhan, to look in on the wet markets. “It’s a ghost town,” he said. “I’m seeing clothes hanging from the meat hooks. There are no signs of reckless slaughter. I expected to see cats and dogs and meat flying all over the place, but there’s zero.”
In March, before I’d heard of No Dogs Left Behind, a colleague told me that an airplane full of dogs from China had arrived late last year at J.F.K. I immediately pictured a passenger cabin with purebreds in first class, mutts in the back, a service Lab rolling a cart of treats down the aisle. One of the adopters at J.F.K. that day was Mia Polansky, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering at Harvard. Early in 2020, she and her partner, finally in an apartment that allowed pets, started looking for a dog. To get pole position on a shelter database, she wrote a script on Python that automatically refreshed the screen. Then a post on Facebook directed her to N.D.L.B.’s page, where she came upon videos of a three-or-so-year-old mini poodle named Pixie, at one of the organization’s shelters in Gongyi. “She was destined for slaughter and our brave activists saved her,” the video’s caption read. She was looking for “her forever home.”
Polansky paid the adoption fee of nine hundred and seventy-five dollars. It was June, 2020, and no one, man or beast, was going anywhere. In October, she paid an additional twelve hundred dollars, to account for the higher cost of pandemic transport. A month later, on the day after Thanksgiving, Pixie arrived on an Air China flight from Beijing. At Building 151, Pagano and a crew unloaded cages of rattled and dirty dogs stacked on pallets. There were eighty-one dogs aboard. Seven had died days before the trip. Polansky and her partner were out on the tarmac to greet Pixie, whom they had renamed Tuzi—Mandarin for “rabbit”—and had got her a dog seat, for the drive back to Cambridge. “Oh, God, it’s a real dog,” Polansky said to herself. “This isn’t a video game anymore.”
Six months later, Polansky has misgivings about N.D.L.B.—“The military symbolism and the videos, it all has a cultlike feel”—but not about the dog. “I look at Tuzi and, if it weren’t for them, she would have starved to death. It’s undeniable that they’re saving so many dogs.”
Another dog aboard the Air China flight was bound for Canada. Taylor Vincent, a dog groomer in her twenties, had learned about No Dogs Left Behind through a corgi Facebook group. She loved corgis, always had, and by coincidence so did her boyfriend, Jack. Their house, in Brantford, Ontario, is cluttered with corgi statues and fixtures. They had a corgi who had epilepsy and wanted a companion for him. Also, her family’s Labrador had recently died. “This was and still is one of the hardest days of my life,” she said.
Last April, they adopted a long-haired Pembroke corgi named Faye. Seven months later, Faye arrived at J.F.K., and then two days later, via transport, in Ontario. Vincent had paid thirty-five hundred dollars. “We were told she was saved from an illegal Chinese puppy mill and was being sold for meat,” Vincent said. “I asked that Jeff Beri guy, who said she’d been rescued from a slaughterhouse truck. But there’s no video of it.”
Vincent said she’d heard stories from other adopters that had soured her on N.D.L.B. “I’ve got a few friends who have adopted from there,” she said. “All of them had bad experiences getting them here, so I felt kind of bad.” A pug arrived “heavily pregnant” in spite of assurances that the dogs had all been spayed. One dog had a dislocated hip. Another had a deformed leg requiring expensive surgery. Another was eleven years old, rather than three, with tumors and dental problems. “They love the dog, but . . . ,” she said.
In November, when Faye finally arrived, by van, Vincent and her boyfriend cried. “I would die for this dog,” she said. They had decided never to have children. “We think of our corgis as our kids, but not in a crazy way.” ♦
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