Posted on 08/01/2006 10:04:54 AM PDT by Cagey
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.
>>>...and destroying their remains....
The furnace:
The furnace unit on the southwest side of the hospital. There are two doors leading to the underground complex of the Sujiatun death camp. According to the witnesses, the remains of Falun Gong practitioners are incinerated here after their organs are extracted.
Fried chicken is the first thing you smell in Martinsburg!
Sweet and Sour Shi-Tzu?
Now go shopping and leave Cagey alone. You are way out of line with beating him up.
New cookbook just came out....."How to Wok Your Dog".
My dad served in China during the Second World War and he often told stories of how good the Chinese he met were. And I've talked with a man who served with him and has been back to mainland China recently and said there are still many, many, Chinese who remember how we helped free them of the Japanese during that war.
It is a corrupt and evil government that has run China for so many years but like you, I have faith in that one day the Chinese people will change their government.
It's hot here in Yankeeland too, so a moonpie and Royal Crown sounds good to me also.
Hahahahaha! Come on Calpernia, If you're really a Jersey Girl you should have said "Now go shopping and buy me something!"
Ok, I will! Off to a blue light special :)
ciao!
---groan---
but, ROFL!!!
Don't forget to bring back some fishing tackle.
We spent a couple months in Guangdong province, mostly in Guangzhou. The only dogs we saw were in the market, either already slaughtered or waiting to be. The only exception was a German Shepherd which was in a cage beside a wolf at the Guangzhou zoo.
THe first food shop we went into in Hong Kong had ox penis on the menu.
I'm not kidding.
And no, we didn't try it.
In the meantime, I don't eat dog, either.
I wonder why Hitlar's death camps were condemned, yet these are still operating. You know that with our technology, we can almost read license plate numbers. Surely we can tell whether large numbers of people go in a door, and don't come back out whole!
We have people so worried about a single dead woman here, when there are so many others facing imminent death, at the hands of butchers, with nobody to go to court (the court of public opinion) for them.
If any government agents tried a stunt like this in the US, there would be more dead government agents than dead dogs when it was all over.
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