Here's a lovely story to end the year from our own Rainbow Zhu, who organised a fantastic event in Chengdu to promote dogs as our friends, not food. Happy New Year to you all!

Even though the temperature dropped dramatically, over 20 volunteers from local communities and pet clubs joined our campaign on 21 Dec – the Winter Solstice in the Chinese lunar calendar. Some people believe that winter, especially the Winter Solstice, is the best time to eat dogs to keep warm. We chose this day to battle against this belief.

This year, we had three venues in downtown Chengdu to spread our message that dogs are our best friends, and it's not safe to eat dogs, as the trade is not regulated by the government.

We prepared lots of “Friends….or Food? leaflets and posters declaring “We care about your pain”. We played Dr Eddie’s film showing the brutality of live animal markets plus the interview of professionals explaining why they don't eat dogs. This attracted much attention from people passing by.

Three Dr Dogs joined as well to show people how gentle and lovely and helpful they can be. The feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive with people saying they hated the dog-meat trade. This time, we placed more emphasis on dog meat's potential negative impact on human health.

The third and last venue we went to is the famous mutton-meat-restaurant street. Half of the city’s population go there to eat mutton during this period. It’s always most crowded on the day of the Winter Solstice.

Animals Asia's Suki reported there were one or two mutton restaurants that were secretly selling dog meat. We cried out even more loudly our slogan “Love animals, don't eat cats and dogs” when passing by these two restaurants.

The event also attracted the attention of the media – three newspapers and two TV stations!