Chinese County Massacres 50,000 Dogs
By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press Writer
Tue Aug 1, 3:26 AM
SHANGHAI, China - A county in southwestern China has killed as
many as 50,000 dogs in a government campaign ordered after three
people died from rabies, official media reported Tuesday.
The five-day massacre in Yunnan province's Mouding county spared
only military guard dogs and police canine units, the Shanghai
Daily reported, citing local media.
Dogs being walked were taken from their owners and beaten on the
spot, the newspaper said. Other killing teams entered villages
at night, creating noise to get dogs barking, then honing in and
beating them to death.
Owners were offered 63 cents per animal to kill their dogs
before the teams were sent in, the report said.
The massacre was widely discussed on the Internet, with both
legal scholars and animal rights activists criticizing it as
crude and cold-blooded. The World Health Organization said more
emphasis needed to be placed on prevention.
"Wiping out the dogs shows these government officials didn't do
their jobs right in protecting people from rabies in the first
place," Legal Daily, a newspaper run by the central government's
Politics and Law Committee, said in an editorial in its online
edition.
Dr. Francette Dusan, a WHO expert on diseases passed from
animals to people, said effective rabies control required
coordinated efforts between human and animal health agencies and
authorities.
"This has not been pursued adequately to date in China with most
control efforts consisting of purely reactive dog culls," Dusan
said.
The Shanghai Daily said 360 of Mouding county's 200,000
residents suffered dog bites this year. The three rabies victims
included a 4-year-old girl, the report said.
"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 the official Xinhua News
Agency.
Calls to county government offices rang unanswered on Tuesday.
China has seen a major rise in the number of rabies cases in
recent years, with 2,651 reported deaths from the disease in
2004, the last year for which data was available, according to
the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Experts have tied the rise in part to an increase in dog
ownership, particularly in rural areas where about 70 percent of
households keep dogs. Only about 3 percent of Chinese dogs are
vaccinated against rabies, according to the center. Access to
appropriate treatment is highly limited, especially in the countryside.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment