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Manila. Animal welfare campaigners in the Philippines have won a rare victory in the fight against a cruel trade in dog meat, which is officially prohibited but is carried out under the counter.

In a landmark trial, four men were each sentenced to a year's imprisonment by a court in the northern city of Baguio late last month.

It was the first conviction under an anti-rabies law which specifically bans selling dog meat in the interest of public health. Before that, dog meat traders were invariably charged under a more lenient animal welfare law, and usually got away with just a fine.

The men were nabbed with the carcasses of 30 skinned dogs in the back of a van. The bust followed a tip-off by the Animal Kingdom Foundation (AKF), a British-funded welfare group.

"Many cases (in regions where dog is eaten) never go to trial because prosecutors don't want to intrude on a way of life," said AKF spokesman Luis Buenaflor.

Dog is eaten in several parts of Asia, most famously in China and Korea, where it is a culinary tradition. But even in China, legal experts last year drew up proposals to ban eating dog meat, amid shifts in public opinion.

In the Philippines, the underground dog meat trade is an inhumane business: Dogs, usually strays, are hog-tied, packed into cramped cages and often transported long distances to back-alley slaughterhouses, when they suffer a painful death by clubbing or strangulation.

Animal rights activists estimate that 250,000 dogs are slaughtered yearly for the pot, although most Filipinos recoil at the thought of eating dog meat - and pet ownership is high among the rich and poor alike.

All the same, canine cuisine is popular among the macho, hard-drinking crowd all over the country; and there is a tradition of eating dog meat in parts of the north, with Baguio the centre of the trade.

Animal welfare groups hope that using anti-rabies legislation will set a precedent for courts to hand down harsher sentences, since the 2007 law prescribed a national program to fight the disease. The Philippines is in the global top 10 for rabies deaths, according to the Global Alliance for Rabies Control. Up to 500 people here die from it every year. Last year's toll was 264.

A 2006 government survey estimated the country's dog population at 10 per cent of the human one, which is currently over 90 million people. There are documented cases - but no national data - of Filipinos dying from rabies after eating meat from an infected dog.
But Manny, a wiry taxi-tricycle driver in the Philippine capital's Guadalupe district, has no qualms about chowing down dog-meat stew with a beer.

"A lot of my friends eat it as pulutan," he said, using the Filipino name for the finger-food appetizers taken with alcoholic drinks. "It's got no fat like pork - and I don't see a problem between dogs as pets and dogs as food."

Yet there are occasionally happy endings: In March, police intercepted a van containing 67 slaughter-bound dogs in Tarlac province on Luzon Island. Video footage showed the rescued dogs, dehydrated and almost paralysed with fear, piled on top of one another in cages.

They were handed over to AKF's shelter on a property in Tarlac, which houses around 500 dogs at any one time. The animals are put up for adoption or allowed to live out the rest of their lives at the shelter.

"We have a no-kill policy for healthy animals," said Buenaflor.