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May 7, 2026 – Animal rescue groups are blaming the fatal case of a 27-year-old woman found injured along a Yuen Long cycle path on the mistreatment and casual abandonment of warehouse guard dogs. The woman was discovered near Pok Wai South Road with severe lacerations to her head, face, neck, arms and legs. She was later pronounced dead at Pok Oi Hospital. Police did not confirm the exact cause, but three dogs were seen chasing her in an area dotted with warehouses.
Rescuers say the tragedy should be read as a warning about a decade-old problem: free-roaming dogs are being treated as disposable security equipment, and then left to fend for themselves in unfamiliar territory.
Jacqueline Cheung, founder of Love Adopt Animal Society, has spent years working with dogs in Hong Kong’s rural New Territories. She said warehouse guard dogs are technically under the broad label of strays, but they occupy a difficult grey area.
“They are not really wild dogs, and they are not really pets,” Cheung said. “They have a job, but nobody takes responsibility for them.”
According to Cheung, many of these animals live in industrial yards, open car parks and villages across Sheung Shui, Ping Shan, Fanling and Yuen Long. Around eight in ten of them are working animals kept under conditions that amount to neglect. They receive table scraps when food is available, but over long public holidays, many are left without meals.
She noted that their natural territorial instincts make them more likely to react aggressively when a stranger enters the space they protect. Much of that behaviour, she added, is shaped by human treatment.
Some warehouse dogs are constantly chased away, beaten, sprayed with water or pelted with objects, the veteran rescuer said. Others are tied up with heavy iron chains. When a warehouse or car park is cleared for land resumption projects, these animals suddenly lose the only terrain they know. The result, Cheung said, is a fearful and anxious animal that stays on high alert.
One of the biggest challenges for rescue groups is establishing ownership.
“Some dogs have collars. Most do not. They simply linger around the property long enough to be treated as part of the furniture,” Cheung said.
Warehouse and car park operators generally do not sterilise the dogs, allowing them to breed freely. Dogs are raised without socialisation, and their instinct to guard the perimeter is almost never tempered by human contact.
Cheung said the pattern is painfully predictable: once a dog becomes sick or injured and stops being useful, the operator will call volunteers to collect it.
“Calling us is not the same as caring for them,” she said. “By the time we hear about a dog, it has often been discarded.”
She believes the most humane and effective answer is a trap-neuter-return programme. Such a model would see dogs temporarily trapped, spayed or neutered, and then released back into their original environment. It would control the population while allowing the animals to live out their lives.
Kent Luk Ka-chit, founder of Paws Guardian Rescue Shelter, agreed that culling alone is not a long-term solution.
Luk proposed a government-funded animal shelter managed by charitable groups. The shelter would focus on neutering, basic veterinary care and adoption placement. That, he said, could become a real alternative to the city’s persistent reliance on euthanasia.
His comments come as official data from the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department shows a slow but troubling trend. The department recorded 338 dogs euthanised in 2021, 280 in 2022, 372 in 2023, 436 in 2024 and 375 in 2025. With a further 102 dogs euthanised in the first three months of this year, the total since 2021 has reached 1,903.
Those figures include strays, animals surrendered by their owners and dogs involved in court cases.
Dogs transferred to welfare groups for adoption have also fallen. The number stood at 348 in 2021 and 2022, dropped to 319 in 2023, rose slightly to 328 in 2024, then fell to 226 in 2025.
Despite those figures, complaints about stray dogs have dropped sharply. The department said complaints went from nearly 20,000 per year in 2004 to about 1,300 in recent years. Luk said the drop may reflect growing tolerance, but it should not be mistaken for a solved problem.
He called for better education and government subsidies to encourage adoption, as well as harsher fines for pet smugglers. Reducing the flow of sick and abandoned animals, he argued, is the only way to bring down the stray population at the source.
The Yuen Long incident has put a spotlight on a fear that many local residents have carried for years.
A San Tin resident who gave his surname as Chan recalled a close call in late February. While cycling home from Yuen Long, he was blocked by four or five dogs around one kilometre from where the woman was later found. The dogs initially blocked the cycle lane, and when Chan tried to move towards the vehicle road, they followed and blocked that path too. He was forced to turn back and take a longer route home.
Chan said the problem has persisted for a long time. Many residents, including people in his village, have been bitten or chased. He described the offending animals as “free-range” dogs kept by nearby container gardens, recycling depots and car workshops.
“The dogs are meant to guard the entrance,” Chan said. “But they drift further and further away from their spot. Eventually they are not guarding anything. They are just occupying the road.”
Similar accounts have circulated online. In February, a Threads user wrote that he was chased by around ten dogs near the Yuen Long Sewage Treatment Works in January. His father and a cousin were with him at the time. The user said he nearly lost his balance while pedalling and struggled to keep the bicycle under control before shaking the dogs off.
Animal rescue groups say the victim in Yuen Long is not just a single tragic case. She is part of a broader pattern that involves humans at every step.
Dogs are rarely born with a desire to attack people. But when they are beaten, starved and abandoned, they learn to see strangers as threats. Free-roaming guard dogs do not set their own boundaries. People decide where they live, how they are treated and whether they are abandoned when their usefulness runs out.
Cheung said the problem must be solved at the roots. “We cannot simply blame the dogs. We have to stop creating situations where dogs are forced to turn aggressive,” she said.
Until authorities, warehouse operators and the public acknowledge that, the next cyclist or pedestrian to encounter a displaced guard dog may only have seconds to react. For rescue workers, that threat is as predictable as it is avoidable.
