Chinese University Students Save Seven Puppies Who Were Buried Alive on Campus

Security guards at a university in China’s Gansu Province apparently buried a pack of stray puppies alive after discovering them on the campus.

They were buried on the grounds at the Lanzhou University of Finance. But when students heard about the incident, they raced to the site and dug them up using shovels, said Shanghaaist.

🙁 Students at an university in Lanzhou, central China, are facing an unexpected backlash after rescuing a litter… http://t.co/2ukuFDCOVq

— Sandra Lynn (@sandralynn0067) September 27, 2015

“Recently campus security has been getting rid of dogs everywhere,” a witness said, per MailOnline. “Because they’ve buried stray dogs before, we immediately realized what was going on.”

According to a number of reports, stray dogs are a problem for some municipalities in China. Local Chinese Communist Party officials have been less than kind in dealing with them, which have been decried by animal rights activists.

A local government in Shandong Province issued a threat saying local officials would go into people’s homes to kill all dogs owned by residents even they had a license.

Last year, a city in Yunnan Province killed 5,000 dogs after a rabies outbreak.

Compassion for China’s Animals – 颗对中国动物的怜悯心
……bury alive stray #dog puppieshttp://t.co/Nvo1FSik7x pic.twitter.com/DsJhoispBc

— Rosanna Marani (@RosannaMarani) September 23, 2015

In 2006, another county in Yunnan killed 50,000 dogs and three years later, officials in Shaanxi Province killed 37,000 of the animals.

At the time, a local newspaper opined that the killings are “extraordinarily crude” and a “cold-blooded and lazy way for the government to deal with epidemic disease,” reported the Guardian.

“Wiping out the dogs shows these government officials didn’t do their jobs right in protecting people from rabies in the first place,” the state-run newspaper wrote.