My thoughts for the author

[Guest guest]

Re: Let Us Now Kill All The Dogs

China slaughters tens of thousands of canines with giant clubs. How appalling is

it?

Thanks for this column, sir.

It said it allmost all.

It really gives us realisation that each and every continent on earth does have

equaly véry cruel practices towards animals

similar as to what Chinese Authorities do in the open without hiding it.

 

I am however convinced there is more of a lesson to get out of your column, some

sort of a conclusion that really tóps it.

 

I hope you don't mind my by saying that in my view, it ought to be that áll

people, somehow somewhere will be held acountable as individuals for only our

personal actions towards animals. There is no such thing as collective guilt.

There is a reason for all this that lies deep within.

We may condemn eachother of doïng wrong to animals if it is so, surely we

should, but finally that lesson we must learn out of happening to share our

lives next beside other creatures, animals (who are unconditionally enlightened

in the first place),

is to learn the utmost lesson of ultimatly choosing the path of our own

enlightmend by not inflicting suffering to sentiënt beïngs and only do good to

and for them.

 

This goal aimes out to be caring enough to try and devote life reaching out to

animalabusers and anyone who approves of it

in order to sensibelize them who need to be, wherever and whenever.

 

If one succeeds touching even one soul for the good, than it has been worth it.

 

Best regards,

 

Le Petit Chien

Amsterdam, The Netherlands (EU)

perro10

 

 

Let Us Now Kill All The Dogs

China slaughters tens of thousands of canines with giant clubs. How appalling is

it?

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2006/08/09/notes080906.\

DTL

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, August 9, 2006

 

 

 

 

Chinese officials killed 50,000 dogs the other day. Just walked along the

streets and lured them out of their homes and bushes and doghouses using

whistles and firecrackers and then clubbed them to death with giant sticks,

right there in the residential streets, tossed the bodies into big dump trucks

and drove on.

It was a particularly horrific scene, seemingly unimaginable in our

" enlightened " age, a fully sanctioned slaughter ordered up by the local Chinese

government in response to the recent deaths of three local people felled by

rabies. Without some sort of action, more people could die, the government

deduced. Solution: Kill all the dogs. Problem solved, right? Well, not quite.

Now another Shanghai prefecture has ordered the slaughter of all its dogs, too,

in response to the rabies-related deaths of 16 people in the past eight months.

This particular region has an estimated 500,000 dogs. No word yet on how it

plans to kill them all, but the strolling-and-clubbing thing might be the only

way, given how even Chinese citizens tend to be slightly uncooperative when it

comes to giving up their pets for random government massacre in front of their

very eyes.

Chinese authorities fear a rabies epidemic. Already in China, upward of 2,000

people die per year from rabies (only 3 percent of China's dogs are vaccinated).

It's a worsening problem. It is not, by most estimates, as potentially lethal as

the bird flu epidemic, but it's still highly dangerous. Given how they say it's

far too late (and far too expensive) to vaccinate all the dogs, the clearest way

to stop the epidemic is, well, to kill all the dogs. Isn't it?

There is nowhere to look for the right answer. How do you process this? How can

you file such an unspeakably brutal and seemingly heartless approach? Maybe you

are shaking your head in disbelief. Maybe you can't process it at all, but you

must admit, it brings a up number of powerful -- and deeply revealing -- notions

of just who we think we are.

Start with the birds. Recent bird flu outbreaks prompted the slaughter of

chickens all over Asia. In 1997, Hong Kong slaughtered 1.2 million chickens to

try and stop the first big outbreak, but it was only the tip of the bloody

iceberg. Asia (and to a lesser degree, Africa and India) have since slit the

throats of hundreds of millions of birds to stop what some scientists see as the

most deadly potential epidemic of this age.

So, the obvious question: Was the poultry slaughter any less horrible than

what's now happening to the dogs? More justifiable due to the potential for

human loss? Maybe so. Or maybe it's simply because we love fuzzy cute dogs more

than ugly dumb chickens.

It is difficult to parse. Obviously, dogs are much less valued in China as pets,

as creatures with soul, than they are in the United States. It is an ugly

cultural divide we cannot easily traverse.

By most estimates, China has a decidedly ruthless perspective on the animal

kingdom. For one thing, a billion people with an enormous underclass of poverty

translates into perhaps one of the most truly bizarre and massive food

marketplaces in the world, one that would certainly make most Americans quite

sick. Or instantly vegetarian.

As my knowledgeable travel friends tell me (and many food shows and travel

documentaries obviously prove), there is nothing on this planet quite like a

Chinese " wet market " for experiencing the full, glistening, slimy array of the

animal kingdom, all manner of parts and organs and skins and droppings and other

ghastly unmentionables -- not to mention insects and sea creatures and

freakishly colored squishy things few people seem to be able to clearly identify

-- that can be eaten by humans.

They eat everything. No animal is off limits, no body part impossible to skewer

or steam or peel or eat raw while still warm from the body. And there are plenty

of tales of what constitutes a food delicacy in China that may seem terribly

weird or cruel to us. But overall, you can also argue that it's a very efficient

and thorough system. Nothing is wasted.

But wait. Is America really that much more evolved? Do we not kill millions of

ill-bred, hormone-injected, mistreated animals every single day in giant

industrial slaughterhouses to feed our gluttonous and largely toxic fast-food

cravings? You bet we do.

As for dogs, well, we love them to death: Our nation's overrun animal shelters

kill an estimated 3 to 4 million dogs and cats per year due to overbreeding and

puppy mills and ignorance of spaying and neutering. They're not even rabid. They

are no threat whatsoever.

You have to ask: Are we much better at our treatment of animals simply because

we've learned to hide it better? Because most of us will never come anywhere

near one of those gruesome industrial feedlots in, say, rural Kansas or

Oklahoma, where they cram tens of thousands of cattle into concrete-enclosed

pens and the air is so thick with fetid gasses and feces and smokestack spewings

you can smell the stench 100 miles away?

But hey, at least we don't club our dogs in the streets in broad daylight. We're

not, you know, monsters.

To be fair, many in China were outraged by the initial dog slaughter. The

brutality, the primitive approach is simply unspeakable, even for a country

known for its dispassionate look at the animal world. Then again, many said the

mass slaughter was entirely appropriate. After all, 2,000 people died in one

year. Of course, 2,000 also die every single day from government-sanctioned

smoking addictions. But, you know, oh well.

The wise ones say you can measure the wisdom and spiritual consciousness of a

culture by how it treats its animals. But it's a strange maxim. It is a

guideline that is nearly impossible to properly navigate in the modern world, no

matter what the culture, simply because there are so many gross contradictions,

from respectful and tender to absolutely ruthless and abusive.

And it's not just China. And it's not merely animals. It is nothing new, this

mass-slaughter idea, emerging from somewhere deep within our darkest and most

mindless souls: Got a bad case of something? Problem with some sort of unwanted

infestation? Mad cows? Killer bees? Dogs? Chickens? Gays? Jews? Kurds? Tibetans?

Rwandans? Sudanese? Pagans? Witches? Communists? Native Americans? Serbs?

Palestinians? Terrorists? That's easy: Kill 'em all.

The method is, apparently, in our blood. We do it all the time.

We know this much: There appears to be a line somewhere. We all seem to sense

it, though no one can quite put a finger on it. We know this line speaks to us

as a supposedly enlightened species, as the creatures with the most advanced

brains and (presumably) most nimble and sophisticated souls.

But if we're honest, it makes us all a little uneasy, a little uncomfortable as

the line often seems to demarcate not how enlightened we are but how far we

truly seem to be from any sort of true evolution or advancement of spirit.

Because so far, the best we as a species seem to have come up with is this: Do

not kill innocent things in broad daylight with large sticks.

 

 

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