Dog Owners Furious At China’s Regulations

Thanks Ben for barking in with news on the Chinese dogs and dog lovers!

Ben wrote:
I think it is great that the Dogster Dog Blog can get attention to issues in which dogs were not treated right. I have recently been alerted to the situation in China from a friend, and was wondering if you could post about it.

In China it is horrible; there is a limit of one dog per family, and that dog has a size limit of 14 inches. Any dogs found unregistered, or violating the restrictions are brutally beaten by the police. (yikes!) Their owners should have the right to protest this, but apparently not. When they peacefully protested this they were arrested. Not only has the Chinese govt. abused the dogs, but also the owners that stand up for them. I really think that something should be done about the situation in China (I can hope).
Best Regards,
Ben

Here’s the most recent news (thanks Ben!) and it was on Comcast.net.

If you have any other articles or better, still, first hand news from China on this subject, please bark in! If there is anything Dogsters can do, please bark in! One good soul commented on the previous post on China that they have acreage and wanted to know how to help. If you know of any efforts we can support, please bark in!

One thing we can do is at the very least is to keep this tragic news in front of the public. Please, if you have a blog or listserv, please cross-post this information or otherwise let folks know about what the Chinese government is doing to our fellow Dogsters!

Beijing Crackdown on Dogs Sparks Protest
By CHARLES HUTZLER, Associated Press Writer

BEIJING – Demonstrators angry at a crackdown on dogs staged a noisy protest in China’s capital on Saturday, decrying police killings of dogs and new limits on pet ownership.

About 200 police strung up tape to cordon off the roughly 500 demonstrators who waved signs and chanted near the entrance to the Beijing Zoo. Many clutched stuffed animals and wore buttons that said “Stop the indiscriminate killing.”

Police detained at least 18 demonstrators in nearby vans for several hours before releasing them, protesters said. Police declined comment.

Touching off the demonstration were new restrictions that limit households to one dog and ban larger breeds. Police in recent days have gone through city neighborhoods, seizing unregistered dogs and beating some of them to death, witnesses said.

“All of us who have dogs to walk are feeling very anxious,” said Wu Jiang, a protester and pet shop owner who has a yellow Labrador retriever. “Most of us only dare come out at night and even then we have to be really careful.”

Keeping pets has been controversial in China for decades. Banned as a middle-class habit during the radical Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, dog-raising surged anew with the introduction of free-market reforms.

Complaints about vicious dogs, barking and excrement-covered sidewalks prompted Beijing to impose height limits in 1995, banning dogs taller than 14 inches from the city center. Many cities have enacted similar measures.

A sharp rise in rabies cases this year led to a renewed clampdown across China. State-run newspapers reported Saturday that 326 people died from rabies in October, again making it the leading cause of death among infectious diseases.

To enforce the crackdown, police in many parts of the country have beaten stray or unregistered dogs to death, sometimes in front of their owners.

Beijing responded by raising fines for having unregistered and unvaccinated dogs, adopting the new one-dog-per-family rule and extending the ban on larger dogs from the city center to encompass the surrounding suburbs.

“We’re asking city residents to go along with us and if they discover any unregistered or stray dogs to report to us by phone,” the Beijing News quoted the city’s vice director of agriculture, Ren Zonggang, as saying in comments on the government’s Web site.

In some cases, protesters said, dog-owners have been given as little as one week’s notice to get rid of their large dogs or move to outlying districts. Protesters said the measures are not only inhumane but wrongly place the burden of punishment on the dogs, not the owners.

“The main point here should be the way dog owners raise their dogs,” said Jeff He of the International Fund for Animal Welfare in Beijing, who watched the protest from beyond the cordon of yellow and black police tape.

Organizers of the protest said they had applied for a permit but had been refused. Though the demonstration was largely peaceful, anti-riot squads in helmets and dark uniforms were dispatched, plainclothes police milled through the crowds and large numbers of uniformed police sat in trucks down the street.

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