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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: November 2006

"Year of the Dog" brings help for dogs in China--and cats

 

BEIJING, SHANGHAI--"The year of the dog has been difficult for man's best friend," South China Morning Post reporter Jane Cai observed on October 26, 2006. "Tens of thousands of canines have been culled across the nation in the past few months and more will be clubbed to death soon by local governments fearing rabies."

True enough, but the 2006 Year of the Dog appears also to have been the year that purging dogs began to give way to vaccination. All year, the Beijing-run state newspapers and news web sites have been exposing and denouncing dog massacres, always in the past either praised or ignored.
An October forum on humane rabies control, held in Shanghai, drew high-profile national coverage.
"Human rabies infections have rebounded rapidly since 1996," warned Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention researcher Zhang Yongzhen, presenting scary numbers: 2,154 human rabies deaths in the first nine months of 2006. Three hundred ninety-three people were bitten by rabid dogs nationwide in September alone, resulting in 318 human deaths, twice as many as in 1996 for the entire year.

For five consecutive months rabies caused more human deaths in China, the forum delegates heard, than any other infectious disease--and worse outbreaks could occur.

In the first seven months of 2006, more than 110,000 Beijing residents and 52,500 Shanghai residents received post-exposure rabies vaccination after being bitten by an unvaccinated or suspected unvaccinated dog or cat.

Rates of dog vaccination vary in China from a safe 75% in Beijing to under 5% in some rural areas--especially the areas where dogs are raised for meat. So-called "meat dogs" are not vaccinated because the farmers contend that they have no exposure to potentially infected street dogs.

Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention virologist Tang Qing shared her findings that in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Hunan Province, and Guizhou Province, three regions with high incidence of rabies, between 3% and 7% of the dog population are infected at any given time. All three regions are hubs of dog meat production.

Chinese Academy of Science's Institute of Zoology researcher Zhang Zhongnin emphasized that rabies can be prevented without cruelty. "There is no need to be scared," Zhang Zhongnin said. "Culling is allowed by law, but should only be used when the situation is extremely bad."

Dog culls continued late into the fall, but met active resistance, including in the Guangdong suburbs.
"On September 27," reported Sophia Cao of the China Digital Times, "ten urban administration officers in Dongguan went to Shangjiangcheng village to kill stray dogs. They beat seven or eight dogs to death in five minutes, frightening some women. Three young men ran out with kitchen knives and tried to stop them. Some villagers complained that the violent scene would scare children; some complained that they lost their watchdogs."

An accompanying photograph showed a young man confronting a uniformed dog killer, knife in hand.
"After about a dozen dogs were killed, farmers beat the hired culling team with iron bars," added Jane Cai of the South China Morning Post.

Increasing vaccination

Shanghai recently moved to improve tracking vaccination compliance by microchipping 65,000 licensed dogs.

More than 550,000 dogs are licensed in Beijing, 90,000 more than in 2005, "but statistics from the Beijing Association for Small Animal Protection show that there are over one million dogs in Beijing," Xinhua News Agency editor Fiona Zhu reported.

Forty-five clinics open 24 hours a day and 277 clinics in all offer post-exposure vaccination in Beijing. The coverage is good enough, and dog vaccination compliance high enough, that no human rabies cases have resulted from bites in Beijing in recent years. However, rabies deaths have occurred in Beijing, as some victims have fallen ill in Beijing after receiving bites elsewhere, and others have been flown to Beijing for palliative care.

In August 2006, "police inspections in more than 1,000 Beijing neighborhoods netted 230 cases of illegal dog keeping," reported Chen Zhiyong of China Daily.

That was just before Beijing authorities escalated dogcatching efforts that through mid-October had netted 8,961 dogs, only 831 of whom were strays found running at large. Beijing police also "shut down a local underground dog trade market in Tongzhou District and confiscated 79 unregistered and illegally-traded dogs there, wrote Wu Jiao of China Daily.

"The campaign aims to protect the public against ferocious stray dogs and rein in unlicensed dogs," but by vaccinating them, not killing them, explained Beijing vice mayor Ji Lin. "Catching and inoculating all the stray dogs is a major way to curb the spread of rabies," Ji Lin said.

"Shelters and health facilities are to be built in Beijing for the hundreds of thousands of stray animals wandering the streets of the capital, according to the city bureau of agriculture," the official Xinhua News announced at the outset of the Beijing campaign. "A spokesperson said the bureau had completed drafting a regulation on constructing an urban shelter system, now awaiting approval from the municipality.

"The bureau will also subsidize animal clinics that vaccinate, sterilize, and treat homeless cats, paying half the costs," working in partnership with animal charities, Xinhua News added. The Beijing Association for Small Animal Protection Association estimates that the city has more than 400,000 feral cats distributed among 2,400 neighborhoods.