Dog Massacre in China is Proof
Living in U.S. Doesn't Totally Suck Ass

By Kevin Gibson
August 10, 2006

Complain all you want about high gas prices, chaotic healthcare and the fact Pres. George W. Bush is a complete idiot (I know I do), but the recent dog slaughters in China are proof yet again that living in the United States doesn’t suck.

I’m sure you’ve heard about this dog slaughter issue, and if you haven’t … well, if you’re a dog lover like I am, you may not want to. But here it goes anyway.

The Shanghai government recently ordered the slaughter of 50,000 dogs as a response to three human deaths due to rabies. (Although government officials showed their sensitivity by offering pet owners 63 cents each to kill dogs on their own. Wow. Sixty-three cents.) But here's what really happened: Police officials literally approached many owners walking their pets and beat the animals to death with sticks right on the spot. In neighborhoods, police walked the streets making noise to get the dogs barking. They would then seek out the source of the barking and slaughter the animals immediately.

Three human deaths. Fifty thousand dogs. Three. Fifty thousand. And as of this writing, another slaughter was scheduled for the week of Aug. 6, according to a story by The Associated Press.

Give me a gun.

(AP photo)

Here’s the kicker: Only three percent of the dogs in China are vaccinated against rabies. THREE PERCENT. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

Yeah, exactly: Get your collective head out of your Chinese ass and do something about your healthcare system. This is literally barbaric behavior – we have the medical technology to prevent such rabies deaths, yet more than 2,000 Chinese people each year die from rabies. And they blame the dogs?

As one anonymous blog poster put it (and I paraphrase), “Thousands of people die in auto accidents every year, but we haven’t banned cars.” And thousands of children nearly shit themselves every year from being scared by clowns, but we haven’t beaten the clowns to death in the streets. (Although THAT I might be able to forgive. Let’s take out the mimes, too, just to get the point across.)

Seriously, I don’t consider myself a racist, but when I first learned of this and saw some of the pictures, I wanted the U.S. to bomb China immediately. Of course, then I remembered that would only kill more dogs, so I backed off that position.

But it hurts me to even think of these slaughters. I consider my dog part of my family; I love him almost as much as I do many humans – he’s more loyal, more affectionate and certainly easier to get along with. And if government officials came at him with sticks with the intent to kill, they’d have a fight to the death on their hands – with me.

PETA (a group I have no fondness for, just for the record) is publicly boycotting Chinese products, etc. And there has been some outrage in China as well. Yes, it’s true, dogs are eaten in China and also killed for other uses in certain parts of the country. Not so long ago, dogs were hunted down as pests, the way Americans do with roaches, rats and mice. But I look at it this way: If there are 500,000 dogs in China (and the AP coverage said there are), that tells me there are a lot of Chinese people who keep them as pets and care about their dogs the way I care about mine. What does a government-ordered dog slaughter say to them?

All it says is that the government doesn’t really give a shit about them because it isn’t addressing the problem – only the symptom.

But it’s also a completely different culture than what we have here, and we have to keep that in mind. Which brings me back to my original point: Complain all you want (and I will join you at times), but I’m going to go scratch my dog’s stomach and thank my lucky stars I live in a place where I have the right to do so.

E-mail me at kgramone@aol.com. Here, boy. It's going to be OK.