Associated Press - SHANGHAI, China (Aug. 2) - 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 the brutal policy pointed to deep weaknesses in the health care infrastructure in China, where 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 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.
"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. Located in mountains about 1,240 miles southwest of Shanghai, Mouding is famed for its Buddhist shrines.
About 70 percent of rural households now keep dogs, according to the Chinese Center of Disease Control and Prevention, and increased rates of dog ownership have been tied to a surge in the number of rabies cases in recent years. It said there were 2,651 reported deaths from the disease in 2004, the last year for which data was available.
Access to rabies treatment is also highly limited, especially in the countryside, said Dr. Francette Dusan, a World Health Organization expert. Effective rabies control requires coordinated efforts between human health, animal health and municipal agencies and authorities, Dusan said. "This has not been pursued adequately to date in China, with most control efforts consisting of purely reactive dog culls," she said.
Health experts said the brutal policy pointed to deep weaknesses in the health care infrastructure in China, where 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 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.
"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. Located in mountains about 1,240 miles southwest of Shanghai, Mouding is famed for its Buddhist shrines.
About 70 percent of rural households now keep dogs, according to the Chinese Center of Disease Control and Prevention, and increased rates of dog ownership have been tied to a surge in the number of rabies cases in recent years. It said there were 2,651 reported deaths from the disease in 2004, the last year for which data was available.
Access to rabies treatment is also highly limited, especially in the countryside, said Dr. Francette Dusan, a World Health Organization expert. Effective rabies control requires coordinated efforts between human health, animal health and municipal agencies and authorities, Dusan said. "This has not been pursued adequately to date in China, with most control efforts consisting of purely reactive dog culls," she said.
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In Buddhism, there are six realms of samsaric existence that sentient beings are born into and they transit from one realm to another: Gods, Demi-Gods, Humans, Animals, Hungry Ghosts and Hell.
The animal realm is supposedly nothing but suffering. Animals suffer, even the pampered pets, because they are living in ignorance, they are driven by instinct and they have no way of acquiring the knowledge that will make them take the steps towards enlightenment. When they die, they will be reborn into yet another life in the animal realm, with the same prospects of suffering and ignorance, in an endless cycle.
Those people who, directly or indirectly, participate in this pointless slaughter, are living in the same animal realm as their victims, for they are also driven by their instinct (fear, in their case) and their ignorance to take the life of another sentient being and sowing the seed of bad karma, instead of taking advantage of their human nature to strive towards enlightenment.
1 comment:
I can barely look at the pictures. And I feel bad, cause somehow I'm more upset at the massacre of these poor animals than at the violent death of the innocent people in Lebanon or Israel or Iraq... Bloodshed and violence everywhere you look, nowadays...
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