XINHUA: One person dead from rabies in Yunnan's Nila County, government orders the killing of all dogs and cats

Caption: A dog in a net being killed, before being dumped in a hole, the cullers will throw the dog into a hole.

It was "Whacking Day" in Nila county, Yunnan, after a rabies death. The less-acknowledged face of 'humanism' ...ai-yaa

One thing i'm noticing about these Xinhua news stories is their total lack of style. (ok maybe it's my substandard Chinese understanding that makes me miss the subtleties.) But surely repetition is one thing that's unnecessary in any language. What about that caption above??

Regarding the contents of that caption, sadly i rather doubt every dog and cat will be dead before they're buried. It would be unlikely, you would think, that the 'pounce-killers' would have the endurance to thoroughly crush 90,000 skulls.

I wonder whether the local CCP honchos' trophy-dog collies and pugs and golden retrievers somehow 'escaped'. Funnily enough though, with the people's doubts in the lead para, and the government's explanation left to the last para, and indeed left to a random "Livestock Bureau staff member surnamed Li", the Xinhua rundown seems to be somewhat slanted against the local government's pounce-killing ('culling', we like to call it). Even the headline seems to be offsetting the "one" person with "all" dogs and cats.

The bigger background, however, to the extreme whacking measures is that according to one of China's most respected news magazines rabies is "running rampant" through China - yet no-one is talking about it. Caijing magazine says more than 3,300 people died of rabies in 2007, compared to only 153 in 1996, making China second only to India for rabies deaths.

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ONE PERSON DEAD FROM RABIES IN YUNNAN'S NILA COUNTY, GOVERNMENT ORDERS THE KILLING OF ALL DOGS AND CATS

According to a "Capital Times" report, after a recent death from "Crazy Dog Disease" in Nila County, the county government ordered every dog and cat in the county to be pounced on and killed, with heavy fines for anyone hiding one. Some locals questioned the total-cull method, to which officials replied that people's lives were more important than dogs'.

According to local Livestock Bureau statistics, Nila had over 90,000 dogs in total as of September 3, of which 84,187 were immunised, and 11,505 had been pounce-killed.

One person dead, whole county kills dogs

A cable from Nila County Government Office assistant director Zhang Cheng shows that when the first "Crazy Dog Disease" death occurred on July 25 in Niyang town, rabies-prevention leadership groups immediately sprung into action: every dog and cat within a 5km radius of the neighbourhood was killed.

To date, 6 "Crazy Dog Disease" deaths have occurred in Nila County. [ed: it doesn't say since when...]

"Crazy Dog Disease can be prevented, but it can't be cured," said Zhang Cheng, so taking the most severe prevention methods was inevitable.

Livestock Bureau claims pounce-killings legal

"Rural security fundamentally depends on the dog," some locals say. If there are no dogs anywhere on the farm, how to prevent theft becomes the most pressing problem. Besides, why the need to pounce-kill dogs that have received registered immunisation injections?

Countering these questions, a Nila County Livestock Bureau Office staff member named Li said Crazy Dog Disease is classified as a type of animal epidemic, and according to the Animal Epidemic Prevention Law rules, the rabies virus carried by dogs in the epidemic area can mutate, and dogs could carry the virus before the rabies death case occurred, hence the total pounce-kill.

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Original link: 云南弥勒县1人死于狂犬病 政府令捕杀所有猫狗

Animal cruelty, as anyone who has walked past a turtle seller in a Chinese market while a sale is in progress can attest, is a part of daily life here. You wouldn't believe some of the shit i've seen on Youtube, too, believe me you don't want to see it. The cruelty i saw in Timor, so much poorer, i concluded was mainly due to people's lives being such a struggle that consideration for animals wouldn't cross their minds. But here i think it is ingrained culturally; certainly acceptance of it is. The fact that the official government news agency refers to the mass slaughter as 'pounce-killing' - where English invariably uses the deceptive "culling" - suggests the same. I don't know if it's the supreme humanism of Confucius . . . i would have thought the old guy would say given animals' noble acceptance of people's superiority, people should treat animals as any superior should treat their inferior - kindly. I may be getting ahead of myself here, but the Chinese word for 'animal' literally means 'moving objects', apparently placing them alongside all other inanimate objects, with their distinction being only that they move.

This is of course not a judgement of the Chinese, by the way. I've seen enough western factory farming exposes, yet I still eat meat. I would click a Get-up button labelled "take action", were one to conveniently appear on my screen....