Report: Bali street vendors brutally kill street dogs, sell meat to tourists as 'chicken satay'

Street vendors in Bali are brutally killing dogs and selling the meat to tourists under the guise of "chicken satay," according to an Australian investigation.

Unsuspecting tourists in the popular resort city of Bali are eating dog meat that’s being advertised as chicken satay, according to a disturbing new report.

The Australian Broadcasting Company reports that an investigation led by Animals Australia found that vendors in the Indonesian hotspot were deceptively selling tourists dog meat, which was the product of torturing and killing dogs.

After telling an undercover investigator that the food was made from slaughtered canines and not chicken, the vendor approached tourists on 66 Beach in Seminyak.

“Satay just one dollar,” the vendor is heard saying on video, but when pressed about what was in the “mystery bag,” he doesn’t disclose the same information to the Australian visitors.

“Satay chicken, not dog?” one tourist asked.

“No, not dog,” the vendor replied.

“I’m happy just as long it’s not dog,” the man said before buying and consuming the meat.

“Tourists will walk down a street, they’ll see a street store selling satay but what they are not realizing is the letters RW on the store mean it is dog meat being served,” Animals Australia’s campaign director Lyn White said.

Animals Australia

The undercover investigator for Animals Australia posed as a documentary maker interested in the local cuisine.

“I began the investigation by pinpointing and getting to know the key players in Bali’s completely unregulated dog-meat industry,” he said. “Eventually, they invited me to join them as their gangs stole, hunted, poisoned and killed dogs.”

The investigator witnessed dogs who were muzzled, bound by the legs with tape and stuffed into bamboo cages where they laid in their own waste. A dog catcher, who admitted to catching twelve dogs per week because he cannot find another job at age 83, bludgeons the animals to death with a metal pole.

The investigator also saw other ways to kill the dogs, including shooting them and hanging them.

He also filmed a puppy eating a fish head laced with cyanide and dying soon after.

“It took many, agonizing minutes for the puppy to die, and for the first time in my career, I turned off the camera,” he said. “I sat stroking him as he died and found myself apologizing for the cruelty of my fellow man.”

The method of poisoning also poses a threat to the unwitting consumer of the meat.

“Cyanide is not going to be destroyed by cooking. So there will be cyanide throughout the dog’s body,” Dr. Andrew Dawson of the New South Wales Poisons Information Centre said. “The actual risk depends upon how much poison is in the dog meat.”

While eating dog meat is not illegal in Bali, killing animals cruelly or serving meat contaminated with poison is against the law, White said.

“The dog-meat trade breaches animal cruelty laws and food safety laws,” she told ABC. “That is a statement of fact.”

This story originally appeared on people.com.