A county in southwestern China has killed as many as 50,000 dogs in a
government-ordered campaign following the deaths of three local people
from rabies.The five-day massacre in Yunnan province’s Mouding county that
ended on Sunday 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 to death on the spot, it said.
Other killing teams entered villages at night creating noise to get
dogs barking, then homing in on their prey. Owners were offered five
yuan (34p) per animal to kill their own dogs before the teams were sent
in, it said. (AOL News)
The pointer is from EffectMeasure.
It’s still China.
Ann — that is a simplistic version of what happened in the Great Leap Forward, regarding agricultural policy. What actually happened is that, under intense political pressure to increase production, a few areas fudged their predictions upwards and claimed successful experiments with intensive planting. Other areas, under similar political pressure, began using the same methods. The central government was just believing the estimates of the regional cadres.
What that disaster has to do with a hard-line policy to stop the spread of rabies is unclear to me. If the gov’t there thinks they can prevent, say, 100 deaths by killing all these dogs, more power to them. China has lots of dogs, they can replace them EXTREMELY quickly.
Substitute “wolf” or “deer” and you’re not very far from the sorts of things that happened in America, a century or so ago. The scale and scope are larger, but hey, China is bigger.
“But the evidence is pretty strong that they learned that the people were dying, and they did nothing. Or, more accurately, some leaders wanted to stop the deaths but were afraid of Mao”
The budgeting in the Five Years Plans suggests that the deaths were anticipated, with the savings going to arms purchases. For more details see “Mao: The Unknown Story” by Chang and Halliday.
As a lover of people and hater of dogs, I am appalled at the commenters here who claim that killing dogs in the pursuit of a utilitiarian goal is comparable to killing people in the pursuit of a utilitiarian goal. It is not.
In corrdination with the WHO, many countries have recently killed millions of chickens in an attempt to stem the spread of bird flu. No one believes that this will be 100% effective, or that a vastly more expensive set of medical interventions might not do as much or more good. But health experts appear to believe that it is likely to have a marginally positive effect.
The situation with dogs is only different if (1) you value a dog more than a chicken (and I don’t) or (2) you are a health expert with good evidence that some neglected effect with cause this action to backfire. If all you’ve got is “They’re killing dogs! Just like Mao killed people!”, please go away and find a better argument.
David Wright,
I compared Anonymous’ flippant attitude towards killing dogs (we can quickly replace them) to Mao’s attitude towards killing people, because the casual attitudes were so similar. But I found it much, much more shocking that Mao felt that way about his own people than that an outsider (or anyone) felt that way about the dogs.
In terms of policy, I compared the mass slaughter of dogs today to that of sparrows earlier because in both cases, my guess is that it wasn’t thought out. Killing most of the sparrows was stupid and had many unintended consequences. There have been many examples since then of the Chinese government making quick, knee-jerk choices that caused more problems than they solved.
In the 1990s, including a short time after the Handover, I was teaching at a university in Hong Kong, and we were all pressured to use Chinese examples in class as much as possible. So, I discussed the Chinese development of their debt markets – issuing a bunch of government bonds, then deciding that debt was un-Communist and so they wouldn’t pay it back; more recently issuing 3 year bonds and then, just as the principal was due, turning them into perpetuities and feeling generous that they were willing to continue paying interest; there were many examples of their carelessness, arrogance and unwillingness to be bothered by reality.
Another example was satellite TV. Legally, only foreigners are supposed to watch subversive news sources such as the BBC – it’s supposed to be available only in upscale hotels and in condos aimed at foreigners. But some government bureaucrat got greedy several years ago and forced all providers to go through one satellite source that was presumably owned by a Party member’s son or cousin. It turned out that the one provider was so technologically backwards that it was suddenly much easier for everyone to steal satellite signals, so far more people were getting outside news not due to government generosity but to government greed and incompetence.
Another example – China has had a massive problem with bad loans in their banking system for well over a decade. Their strategy was to grow their way out of it, hoping that the problem would just kind of go away as their economy grew. But they never made any changes to their banking system except to tell them to broaden beyond State-Owned Enterprise lending, so the banks have been busy all this time making bad consumer loans. It’s hard to grow your way out of a problem that you’re quickly making bigger.
I could go on and on. Their 5 year plans made every single mistake that is commonly warned against in introductory finance and economics textbooks (in one 5 year plan, they rewarded state-owned enterprises based on the volume of output, without any adjustment for its value; gee, who could possibly have predicted that production of low quality items that no one wanted would skyrocket?).
So, I wasn’t comparing killing dogs to killing people. I was comparing killing dogs as a quick, brainless policy response to killing sparrows as another quick, brainless response. Perhaps this time it was a well thought out, well reasoned response. But that seems unlikely, given their long track record. It was only a few years ago that the management of most companies in China had to spend most of the summer in struggle sessions (although no one got beaten to death, as in the Cultural Revolution).
This response (let’s hunt down dogs and club them to death on the streets) seemed all too similar to the usual mindless dictatorial response that the Chinese Communist Party has provided through the years. I stand by my claim that the policy of clubbing dogs to death in front of their owners is similar to the earlier policy of trying to make loud noises to scare the sparrows, so that they would continue to fly until they died of exhaustion. Does that sound like a well-reasoned, tested strategy?
Anon reporting — there are lots of different reasons people in this thread seem to be mad at China. Communism is bad, sparrows are good, you love dogs, et cetera. But I have to say, from a public health standpoint, killing animals to control infectious diseases is de rigeur. They already do it for chickens, why not dogs? (I reject all crazy ideas about the moral equivalence of dogs and people, especially when the equivalence does not extend to birds, deer, coyotes, etc… )
DK brings up an excellent point: Atlanta kills 90,000 dogs a year. (Remember when Sherman burnt down Atlanta? American government never changes…/sarcasm) He uses this to deduce that this campaign is ineffective, not because it is so brutally and overdone, but because it is such a paltry number compared to the province of Yunnan. But remember, this is not a campaign in Yunnan, but in a county of Yunnan. So the culling could be on a very reasonable scale.
God, I hate the western media.
“Oh my god! The Chinese are beating puppy dogs to death! Right in front of their owners!”
From firsthand experience, I can tell you that dogs have a much different role in Chinese villages than they do in suburban America. Dogs aren’t family members. They’re used for protection. Like most dogs that aren’t pets, villagers beat them so that they’ve got a mean streak and make for better guard dogs.
So if rabies is a problem, I don’t think anyone would find a dispute with getting rid of some dogs. Maybe the policy went a little overboard, but to find a moral objection would just be absurd.
Currence: In numerous cases, in the United States and western Europe, animals that are someone’s valuable property have been killed by the government for public health reasons. Mad cow disease, for example.
The primary objection that you seem to have left is how this was done, i.e. with clubs in front of owners instead of euthenasia behind closed doors. First off, I wouldn’t be entirely confident that a sensation-happy media would get that part right. More importantly, “sensitivity” in such an operation is an expensive luxury. China is not rich. A club is a lot cheaper than a euthenasia operation.
The crazy thing is, they even killed the dogs that were already vaccinnated against rabies, on the ground that the vaccination is not 100% effective. This is the worst possible thing to do for the reasons Ann outlined — there is no way the slaughter is going to cover more than a few percent of the animals, so rabies is not going to get wiped out anyhow. The only way to make sure the animals people frequently come in contact with are rabies free is through vaccination. And now in one fell swoop, you’ve killed all the vaccinated animals and sent a message that it is ineffective. Are the owners going to spend good money vaccinating their new pets now? I doubt it.
By the way, don’t assume that all the dogs that were killed were not loved. There are reports of owners covering their eyes as their dogs are siezed and beaten to death right in front of them with big sticks. I doubt that was the case with any of the animals euthanized in the U.S.
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