Dog Walking Is Now Illegal In Cambodia

On Sunday, April 05, 2015, some of my friends decided to organize a "Say No To Dog Meat" event, which has been conducted in so many countries before. I was extremely excited to join. As a matter of fact, I have been waiting for months just to go to this event.

Cambodia is a country in which a lot of people enjoy eating dog meat. I have actually seen many gruesome photos and heard dogs being dragged along the street. I am a very passionate dog lover, so this was an extraordinary moment for me. It also happened to be my first activist moment. 

My boyfriend and I took our puppy, Joey, to the park to join with other dog-lovers. We just adopted him two months ago, so it would be a great moment for him to socialize. He was very excited.

We were excited to go, not knowing what awaited us

We knew something wasn't right

Once we got to the park, we knew that something was wrong. We saw a group of people gathering around, but we also saw many police officers surrounding those people. You see, my country has a history of banning people for protesting about anything. Literally anything. There was even a point where there was a law banning over 10 people from getting together. 

Confusion filled the air

Some people felt threatened, so they started leaving

Anyway, we approached the crowd, and just as we expected, the group of police officers were trying to break up our group. We were so confused about what was going on. Many expats were participating as well, and they were dumbfounded by how the police officers were yelling at us. They couldn't understand what the officers were talking about. Me, on the other hand, I could understand exactly what they were talking about. 

Police officers telling us to get off the public park

The officers' first reason was that we would "pollute the park with all the dog poop." When we showed them our doggie bags, they came up with another reason.

The second method was to literally yell at us to "get off the park." One of my friends and the organizers got there earlier and they told me that the one of the officers even told them, in a quote, "There's no such law to allow people to walk dogs in the park." He proceeded to look at my friend's dog and said, "I could kill that dog with just one kick." Some of the officers kept on yelling at us to get off the park. And by that, I meant they literally were yelling at us. It was a chaotic scene. Even the dogs could sense all the stress fogging up the atmosphere. 

Innocent bystander was told that she wasn't allowed to walk her dog

I had to cross the road for fear that they would take my camera

This officer told us to go walk the dogs in the middle of the busy street

We were so shocked and confused that some of us gave up and went our separate ways. Of course, some of us had to walk on the park to get to the other side. Guess what? We weren't allowed to do that. I was actually told by this officer in the white helmet (photo below) that "dog walking has never been allowed in park." He said to me, and I would never forget this sentence, "You can't walk your dog on the sidewalks. If you want to walk, just go walk in the middle of the street." The street was busy, so I'm assuming that they were telling us to go die.

Be warned, you might not want to walk your dogs here

To be honest, I was furious. I never even thought this would ever happen in my life. I have seen many protests being stopped by the police and even protestors being beaten. Of course, some of those protests were politics-related, but this is just a campaign to raise awareness and stop people from eating dog and cat meat. 

I thought this was a democratic country? Since when can't we do anything? Are those officers so threatened by dogs that they had to even stop us? Those officers were armed, for Chris' sake. Can someone please tell me what is going on in Cambodia? Do we really have to accept this and bite our tongues? Or is it time for us to go "hunger games" on them and rebel?