Chinese County Slaughters 50,000 Dogs, Most in Front of Owners

By Linda Orlando

After three people died from rabies, the government of Mouding County in Yunnan province decided that the best way to prevent further deaths was to simply remove the dogs. The Shanghai Daily reported that officials conducted a five-day massacre, killing all the dogs in the county except for military guard dogs and police canine units.

Dogs being walked outside were snatched from their owners and beaten to death on the spot. Killing teams went into villages at night and created noises and disturbances to get dogs to bark, and then they honed in on the barking and beat the dogs to death. Owners were offered 63 cents per pet to kill their own dogs before the killing teams were sent in, but if they refused, the dogs were beaten to death in front of them.

Officials say that of Mouding County’s 200,000 residents, only 360 suffered dog bites this year. The three rabies victims included a 4-year old girl. But last year there were 2,651 reported deaths from rabies, which represents a major rise in the number of rabies cases. 2004 is the last year for which data is available, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Experts say that the rise in rabies cases is partly due to an increase in the numbers of people owning dogs, particularly in the countryside where about 70% of households own at least one dog. Only about 3% of dogs in China are vaccinated against rabies, and access to veterinarians and appropriate prevention measures is extremely limited, particularly in rural areas.

The dog massacre in Mouding County was widely criticized by both legal rights scholars and animal rights activists, as well as the World Health Organization. Dr. Francette Dusan, a WHO expert on diseases that can be passed from animals to people, said that effective control of the spread of rabies requires coordinated efforts between government officials and human and animal health agencies, and education of the public. "This has not been pursued adequately to date in China, with most control efforts consisting of purely reactive dog culls," Dusan said.

WHO officials said that more emphasis needs to be placed on prevention. Legal Daily, a newspaper run by the Politics and Law Committee of China’s central government, ran an editorial in its online edition that said, "Wiping out the dogs shows these government officials didn’t do their jobs right in protecting people from rabies in the first place."

Many media outlets attempted to contact county government offices Tuesday to discuss the slaughter that shocked the world, but telephones rang unanswered. Li Haibo, a spokesman for the county government, was quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency as saying, "With the aim to keep this horrible disease from people, we decided to kill the dogs."