Psychopaths - Dog butchers

[Guest guest]

>This was no mere attempt to save people from catching rabies. These

>butchers obviously got pleasure out of inflicting a slow death on these

>dogs. Why didn't they shoot them? Beating them to death must have been

>exhausting but this was chosen instead of a quick shot through the head.

>Denise

 

 

Access to firearms is very closely controlled in China, and

even if the weapons and ammunition had been accessible to the

non-uniformed public employees who were assigned to do the killing,

discharging firearms in crowded streets would probably have been more

deadly to humans than the rabies outbreak.

 

While the method of killing was undeniably crude, and while

the killing itself was unnecessary. perspective is in order.

 

Killing animals en masse to prevent the spread of rabies was

standard worldwide until prophylactic vaccination was introduced on a

wide scale in the U.S. and Europe barely 50 years ago.

 

The World Health Organization began advising that killing

animals to prevent the spread of rabies was bad strategy in 1973.

Nonetheless, the U.S. continued to try to stop the mid-Atlantic

raccoon rabies pandemic of 1976-1994 by killing raccoons until the

early 1990s, when 20 years after Switzerland introduced oral vaccine

pellets for wildlife, the U.S. belatedly allowed the use of Raboral.

 

(Of note is that the raccoon rabies pandemic was started by

coonhunters and trappers, who translocated 2,000 raccoons from a

rabies-endemic part of Florida to the West Virginia/Virginia border

area. Opposition to using Raboral came from both opponents of

genetic engineering and hunters and trappers who viewed Raboral as a

threat to a traditional pretext for killing wildlife.)

 

Despite the predominance of sodium pentabarbital injection as

the preferred means of animal control killing in the U.S. today,

this was scarcely the case as recently as 20 years ago. When rabies

last raged widely among dogs and cats in the U.S., in the 1950s,

the standard killing methods were clubbing, drowning, shooting,

and gassing with carbide fumes or car exhaust. Decompression killing

was introduced in the late 1940s and became the prevailing killing

method until the early 1970s.

 

While decompression very rapidly lost favor and disappeared

from the U.S. entirely by 1985, the first common forms of injection

killing were also very painful to the animals: magnesium sulfide and

T-61, which were basically paralytics. These methods were banned in

the mid-to-late 1980s, after about 10 years of common use.

 

China is behind the global standard, in short, but not by

all that far.

 

Further to be considered is that because China has in recent

times had little tradition of petkeeping, China has also lacked

fulltime professional animal control agencies. Animal control has

been done more-or-less on an ad hoc basis, by people who have had no

relevant professional training and have no standards to meet other

than achieving the extermination of whatever the alleged threat.

 

What this tends to mean is that Chinese communities typically

have no animal control activity for months or years, until there is

a rabies crisis, and then do all the killing at once that U.S.

animal control agencies do gradually, over time.

 

The numbers of dogs killed in the most recent Chinese

massacres closely compare to the rates of killing in U.S. cities such

as Fresno, San Antonio, Bakersfield, and Mobile, which are from

two to five times higher than the U.S. national rate, and are still

nowhere near as high as the U.S. killing rate of 30-odd years ago,

which was at 115 dogs and cats killed per 1,000 human residents, and

was as high as 250 dogs and cats killed per 1,000 human residents in

North Carolina as recently as 1985.

 

 

--

Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

P.O. Box 960

Clinton, WA 98236

 

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Fax: 360-579-2575

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Web: www.animalpeoplenews.org

 

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