More Chinese Dog Slaughtering

When the first story came out a few days ago, that a southern Chinese county ordered the immediate deaths of 50,000 dogs to contain an outbreak of rabies, I was not very surprised.  This is a communist country, so its ability to handle epidemics, in this case rabies, are very often slow and hardly immediate.  There is also the lack of disease prevention where vaccine distribution is encumbered by an unwieldy bureaucracy.  In addition, China's current culture of animal treatment does not aid in getting their pets properly immunized against diseases that often affect livestock, something the Chinese government, one would think, would be more concerned about.  But today the AP is reporting a massive increase in scale: 500,000 dogs.  I'm not sure if there is now some monetary benefit that the new city is trying to benefit from.  In the first culling, pet owners were offered the equivalent of $0.63 per dog they killed before the killing teams were sent in.  But if the pet owners were notified about the bounty, why did this happen?

 

Dogs being walked were seized from their owners and beaten to death on the spot, the Shanghai Daily newspaper reported.  Photo taken from an earlier culling this year on April 29.

 

Some organizations are reporting, of the 50,000 dogs killed earlier, some 4,000 had already been immunized, which lends some credence to the idea of monetary gain.  Of course, it is PETA reporting this, and I have not been able to confirm these numbers anywhere else except attributing the organization itself.  The slaughter seems to be an extraordinary response to 16 human deaths this year already, but due to the insular culture of communist China, we are not given any information on the number of other animal deaths, be they livestock or other pets.  If anything, it is probably the economic damage to agriculture which is driving this canine pogrom.