LONGGANG police have arrested a man who had allegedly been killing dogs with poisoned darts.
Police on Monday noticed the suspect, identified as Qin, moving slowly in a small blue truck on a road in Kuichong, the Daily Sunshine reported yesterday.
Qin panicked when police stopped him and found a dead dog in the truck.
Police also found two crossbows and more than 100 darts filled with an unspecified poisonous liquid, plus other tools such as iron hooks and bars, the paper said.
The crossbows were equipped with infrared scopes.
Qin confessed that he had used a crossbow loaded with a poisonous dart to shoot the dog in Sanxi Village in Kuichong on Monday morning,
Qin killed more than 10 dogs in November, selling them to dog meat dealers for 4 to 5 yuan (US$0.6-0.75) per 500 grams, police said. The dogs were then sold to restaurants.
Dog meat was in high demand as the temperature drops, leading some unscrupulous individuals to kill dogs for money, police said.
The police are conducting tests on the poisonous liquid found in Qin s truck.
In an earlier report, head of the city s animal health monitoring station, Feng Weiquan, said sodium cyanide is usually used to poison dogs, which die almost instantly.
It s harmful to eat the meat of poisoned dogs and high temperatures [in cooking] would not reduce the potency of the poison, Feng said. (Martin Li)
