Chinese dog-killer sent to labor camp, from ANIMAL PEOPLE Jan/Feb 2004

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2004:

 

Chinese dog-killer sent to labor camp

 

BEIJING, HONG KONG-- " A Wuhan man was sentenced to 18 months

in a labor camp for poisoning more than 80 pet dogs, the Chutian

Metropolis Daily reported circa December 15, 2003. " The man had

been poisoning the dogs and selling them to local restaurants. A

farmer was detained for supplying the rat poison. "

Reprinted by other news media throughout China, the brief

item indicated the fast-rising status of dogs in much of a nation

which remains deeply divided among fear of dogs, love of dogs, and

the belief that dogs are to be eaten.

The significance of the Wuhan case includes acknowledgement

that enough dogs are kept as pets that a criminal can make a business

of stealing them; acknowledgement that killing pet dogs is a crime

warranting punishment as severe as is typically given for poisoning

pets in the U.S.; and the implication that the dog meat business is

not law-abiding and respectable. Also of note is that the offender

was convicted of killing the dogs, not of harming people who might

have eaten their meat.

In some parts of China a citizen might still be officially

praised for killing 80 pet dogs, but not now in Wuhan - and, since

the state-controlled Chinese media tend to publish news to make a

point, maybe not in the future anywhere.

Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, is located in the

cultural no-man's-land that separates Cantonese-speaking southern and

coastal China from the Mandarin-speaking north.

The Cantonese historically have kept more dogs, and have had

less fear of them despite endemic rabies, because in the Cantonese

regions dogs are traditionally bred for slaughter.

Officially there are 6.2 million dogs in Guangdong province,

the hub of the dog meat industry and wildlife-eating, and the only

part of China where cats are often eaten. About 4.5 million dogs per

year are raised in Guangdong for meat. Because government policy

holds that dogs raised for meat are not exposed to rabies, these

dogs are not vaccinated. About 1.9 million Guangdong dogs have been

vaccinated since 1998, and are believed to be pets.

Authorities killed 170,000 dogs in Guangdong during 2003,

purportedly to stop rabies outbreaks, and blamed the outbreaks on

failures of petkeepers to have their dogs vaccinated. However, the

numbers of dogs killed were so much higher than in past years as to

suggest that dog meat farms must have been involved.

Mandarin speakers tend to look down on Cantonese consumption

of dogs, cats, and wildlife, and historically those who could

afford dogs kept them as pets. After 1949, however, the Communist

government instituted frequent dog purges. The initial pretext was

to conserve the food given to dogs. Later the pretext became

preventing rabies. Now, after generations without pet dogs, dogs

are widely feared in Mandarin regions, but fear is yielding to

renewed familiarity, and there is increasingly open acknowledgement

that dog purges may have been used chiefly as an instrument of social

control: " killing the dog to scare the monkey, " as a Confucian-era

proverb describes the tactic.

The Wuhan crime-and-punishment item circulated about two

weeks after the China Daily nationally and globally distributed the

story of Dahuang, or " Big Yellow, " a street dog who for three years

was seen as a neighborhood pet. Exiled from Beijing to rural

Fangshan because of strict Beijing limits on the size of pets,

Dahuang made his way back, starving, bedraggling, and with

injuries from having apparently survived a stoning. Dahuang was to

be exiled again, but the sympathies of the staff and readers of the

China Daily were clearly with him.

The Dahuang story appeared one week after coverage of

disputes over regulations that discourage residents of Nanking and

Shanghai--both in Cantonese regions--from keeping pet dogs in

subsidized housing. Two residents of public housing were quoted in

favor of the policy, but an official of the Shanghai Civil Affairs

Bureau criticized it, and a university psychologist pointed out the

value of pets to low-income people who may have few other friends.

Since Shanghai is believed to rank second only to Guangdong

in numbers of dogs eaten, the state media defense of dogs as friends

may indicate a significant shift in government thinking.

 

--Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

 

--

Kim Bartlett, Publisher of ANIMAL PEOPLE Newspaper

Postal mailing address: P.O. Box 960, Clinton WA 98236 U.S.A.

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Website: http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/

 

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Something to think about: We believe that the Golden Rule

applies to animals, too. We don't accept the prevailing notion

that " people come first' " or that " people are more important than

animals. " Animals feel pain and suffer just as we do, and it is

almost always humans making animals suffer and not the other way

around. Yet in spite of how cruelly people behave towards animals

-- not to mention human cruelty to other humans -- we are supposed to

believe that humans are superior to other animals. If people want

to fancy themselves as being of greater moral worth than the other

creatures on this earth, we should begin behaving better than they

do, and not worse. Let's start treating everyone as we would like

to be treated ourselves.