Celeb-loved animal rights activist accused of staging dog abuse

A Los Angeles animal rights activist is accused of staging gruesome dog killings during trips to slaughterhouses for footage in his foundation videos, according to a report.

Marc Ching, who runs the Animal Hope & Wellness Foundation, allegedly paid a butcher in Indonesia to hang a dog in one video and burn it to death so he could stage the scene for the camera, the Los Angeles Times reported.

His undercover reels from slaughterhouses were brought into question by local animal rights activists in Indonesia, Cambodia and elsewhere in Asia who said that the killings depicted are much crueler than the normal methods there, the outlet reported.

Several butchers captured in Ching’s videos said he showed up on a visit to a market in Tomohon, Indonesia, asking to buy dog meat in 2016, the outlet said.

Ching — who previously served time for kidnapping before launching the foundation — then requested that they were slaughtered in specific ways, including being tortured alive, while he filmed the gruesome scene, according to the report.

Raw footage obtained by the newspaper appears to back up claims that Ching had orchestrated the grisly slayings.

In one video, Ching’s camera follows a butcher, Marthen Wondang, through a dog meat trade at the Tomohon market in 2016.

The camera shows the pooch being tied up with a noose and slowly torched to death, the outlet reported. While the dog is burning, Wondang looks toward the camera and gives a thumbs up and asks, “This is exactly what you want, right?”

“He was smiling and laughing throughout the process. “Like he was happy,” Wondang noted, saying that Ching left the dog meat.

Ching wrote in a court declaration in August 2017 that his “translator filmed the gruesome act only to use as evidence of the cruelty happening in Indonesia,” the outlet reported.

Ching — whose foundation is backed by celebs such as Alicia Silverstone and Shannen Doherty — denied that he instructed butchers how to kill and torture the pooches, the newspaper reported.

“If the question is if I pay people to torture dogs — no, I don’t,” Ching said.

Ching also claimed that the allegations were cooked up by rivals in the animal rescue world.

“Groups slander each other constantly based on the fact that they believe or feel they know better,” he said.

The charity’s board said it has launched an independent investigation, but its attorney, Russell M. Selmont, later said they had found no evidence that Ching “ever staged the burning of any dogs (at Tomohon market or otherwise) or ever knowingly or intentionally contributed to the harm of any animals,” according to the report.

Selmont claimed the butchers’ accounts were unreliable since the footage threatened “to expose their inhumanity and shut down their livelihoods.”

“The notion that Mr. Ching paid these butchers to burn and torture the dogs is sick, twisted fantasy,” he said.