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http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...inadogs02.html
Wednesday, August 2, 2006 - Page updated at 12:00 AM
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50,000 dogs in China killed to control rabies
By Christopher Bodeen
The Associated Press
SHANGHAI, China — China slaughtered 50,000 dogs in a government-ordered crackdown after three people died of rabies, sparking unusually pointed criticism in state media Tuesday and an outcry from animal-rights activists.
Health experts said only 3 percent of dogs are vaccinated against rabies and more than 2,000 people die of the disease each year.
The five-day slaughter in Mouding county in Yunnan province in southwestern China ended Sunday and spared only military guard dogs and police canine units, state media reported.
Dogs being walked were seized from their owners and beaten to death on the spot, the Shanghai Daily newspaper reported. Led by the county police chief, killing teams entered villages at night creating noise to get dogs barking, then beat the animals to death, the reports said.
Owners were offered 63 cents per animal to kill their own dogs before the teams were sent in, they said.
The killings were widely discussed on the Internet, with both legal scholars and animal-rights activists criticizing them as crude and cold-blooded. The World Health Organization said more emphasis needed to be placed on rabies prevention.
The official newspaper Legal Daily blasted the killings as an "extraordinarily crude, cold-blooded and lazy way for the government to deal with epidemic disease."
"Wiping out the dogs shows these government officials didn't do their jobs right in protecting people from rabies in the first place," the newspaper, published by the central government's Politics and Law Committee, said in an editorial in its online edition.
The killings prompted calls for a boycott of Chinese products from the activist group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, whose president, Ingrid Newkirk, said the group had canceled all orders of merchandise it sells that is made in China. Mouding county officials defended the slaughter in a region where about 360 of the 200,000 residents suffered dog bites this year, with three people reportedly dying of rabies, including a 4-year-old girl.
"With the aim to keep this horrible disease from people, we decided to kill the dogs," Li Haibo, a spokesman for the county government, was quoted as saying by Xinhua.
Calls to county government offices went unanswered Tuesday. Located in mountains about 1,240 miles southwest of Shanghai, Mouding is famed for its Buddhist shrines.
Unlike in the West, where dogs have long been cherished as companions or helpmates, dogs have rarely had an easy time in China. Dog meat is eaten throughout the country, revered as a tonic in winter and a restorer of virility in men.
Following the communist seizure of power in 1949, dog ownership was condemned as a bourgeois affectation and canines were hunted as pests. Attitudes have softened in recent years, although urban Chinese are still subject to strict rules on the size of their pets and must pay steep registration fees.
About 70 percent of rural households now keep dogs, according to the Chinese Center of Disease Control and Prevention, and increased rates of ownership have been tied to a surge in the number of rabies cases. It said there were 2,651 reported deaths from the disease in 2004, the last year for which data were available.
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Originally Posted by Slyder
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