More than 2,400 dogs were rescued by animal rights activists on Monday, the Legal Evening News reports.

After being tipped off by social media, some 400 volunteers besieged a truck that was stopped by police at a service station on the Jingha (Beijing-Harbin) Expressway. More than 400 dogs on the truck were headed for slaughter.

Most of the dogs have since been adopted.

Later that night, the same group of animal rights activists spotted four more trucks at a different service station on the Jingha Expressway. They estimated the number of dogs on the trucks to exceed 2,000.

The dogs were sent to a breeding house in Qian'an, Hebei province.

The person in charge of transporting the dogs said he had gotten them for 200,000 yuan ($32,000) and demanded compensation.