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China story of the day
A county in southwestern China has killed as many as 50,000 dogs in a government-ordered campaign following the deaths of three local people from rabies.
The five-day massacre in Yunnan province's Mouding county that ended on Sunday spared only military guard dogs and police canine units, the Shanghai Daily reported, citing local media.
Dogs being walked were taken from their owners and beaten to death on the spot, it said.
Other killing teams entered villages at night creating noise to get dogs barking, then homing in on their prey. Owners were offered five yuan (34p) per animal to kill their own dogs before the teams were sent in, it said. (AOL News)
The pointer is from EffectMeasure.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 6, 2006 at 01:57 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink
Comments
It's still China.
Posted by: Tia at Aug 6, 2006 1:52:04 AM
Wow, this sounds just like Mao's misguided efforts to kill all the sparrows. He thought that sparrows were eating all the crops, so he ordered farmers to kill as many as possible, which of course meant an explosion of insects, since they were no longer being eaten by the sparrows.
Another of Mao's brilliant ideas at the time was to double or triple the crop, simply by planting two to three times as many seeds in the same space (I guess no one ever thought of that before!). Since it was Mao's policy, it was reported to be successful, and local governments were then ordered to collect the usual percentage of the reported crop. Since the actual yield was far lower rather than far higher than average, trying to collect that amount meant stripping farmers of every last grain and leaving them to starve to death, while the warehouses filled up.
Between 10 and 30 million died in the Great Leap, because they had a system where no one could question or apply evidence to government policies. The later Cultural Revolution was only necessary to kill off those with too clear a memory of the outcome of the Great Leap, so it also was a consequence of Mao's stupid crop ideas.
And the Chinese government is still following the same sort of policies! We've been hearing for more than a decade that 'China has changed' and that we should forget everything that happened in the past under communist rule.
There have been changes, certainly, but it's hard to tell how deep they really go when people aren't allowed to freely discuss the mistakes of the past.
Posted by: Ann at Aug 6, 2006 11:46:44 AM
Ann -- that is a simplistic version of what happened in the Great Leap Forward, regarding agricultural policy. What actually happened is that, under intense political pressure to increase production, a few areas fudged their predictions upwards and claimed successful experiments with intensive planting. Other areas, under similar political pressure, began using the same methods. The central government was just believing the estimates of the regional cadres.
What that disaster has to do with a hard-line policy to stop the spread of rabies is unclear to me. If the gov't there thinks they can prevent, say, 100 deaths by killing all these dogs, more power to them. China has lots of dogs, they can replace them EXTREMELY quickly.
Posted by: anon at Aug 6, 2006 1:25:32 PM
Anon, dogs aren't the only carriers of rabies. So if you replace the dogs, you'll recreate the problem. The better solution (assuming that having dogs as a pet is an objective) is vaccination.
However, it's cheaper and easier for a powerful central government to off all the dogs. Plus it serves as a not so subtle reminder to the citizens who's really in charge.
So, yes, this is evidence that despite claims to the contrary, that at its core China has not changed.
Posted by: Jody at Aug 6, 2006 3:06:54 PM
Substitute "wolf" or "deer" and you're not very far from the sorts of things that happened in America, a century or so ago. The scale and scope are larger, but hey, China is bigger.
Posted by: Mycroft at Aug 6, 2006 4:42:07 PM
"China has lots of dogs, they can replace them EXTREMELY quickly."
That's just what Mao said about people, when he called nuclear weapons 'paper tigers' because they would mainly kill millions of people, and China could always produce more.
Yes, my description of the Great Leap was a simplified version, but it was still fundamentally accurate. You seem to be arguing that Mao and others at the top weren’t responsible, perhaps because they didn’t see any of it coming. But the evidence is pretty strong that they learned that the people were dying, and they did nothing. Or, more accurately, some leaders wanted to stop the deaths but were afraid of Mao. Mao could have stopped it at any time, but he didn’t want to admit that his policies were less than brilliant. He seems to have thought that appearance – getting people all fired up – was more important than reality, which is also why he kept having them turn productive assets (plows, bed frames, doorknobs, etc.) into worthless lumps in those backyard furnaces, all for the excitement of reporting massive steel output.
The measures taken in the Great Leap were done without research, without testing, without an attempt to get accurate feedback on their effectiveness either before or after their adoption, because Mao thought that it was more important to be bold and because he liked to be flattered. I think that the government suddenly deciding to kill all of the sparrows in order to correct one perceived problem is fairly similar to it suddenly deciding to kill all of the dogs in order to correct another perceived problem. Perhaps this time the government thought it through carefully ahead of time, or maybe they just took your and Mao’s attitude that, in a country as big as China, lives can always be replaced.
Posted by: Ann at Aug 6, 2006 5:20:22 PM
"But the evidence is pretty strong that they learned that the people were dying, and they did nothing. Or, more accurately, some leaders wanted to stop the deaths but were afraid of Mao"
The budgeting in the Five Years Plans suggests that the deaths were anticipated, with the savings going to arms purchases. For more details see "Mao: The Unknown Story" by Chang and Halliday.
Posted by: Steve at Aug 6, 2006 6:30:59 PM
The Chang and Halliday book has been disputed. I haven't followed the whole thing carefully enough to take sides but just thought I'd point that out. The case rests on much more than that one book - a very good source on the Great Leap is 'Hungry Ghosts', by Jasper Becker.
R.J. Rummel has spent a long time gathering figures on 'death by government', and for many years he thought that counting the Great Leap deaths as the responsibility of Mao was 'sloppy' and inaccurate. He finally saw enough evidence to convince him that he'd been wrong - that Mao knew and chose not to stop the deaths. Here's where he discusses this:
http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2005/11/reevaluating-chinas-democide-to-be.html
Posted by: Ann at Aug 6, 2006 6:53:57 PM
As a lover of people and hater of dogs, I am appalled at the commenters here who claim that killing dogs in the pursuit of a utilitiarian goal is comparable to killing people in the pursuit of a utilitiarian goal. It is not.
In corrdination with the WHO, many countries have recently killed millions of chickens in an attempt to stem the spread of bird flu. No one believes that this will be 100% effective, or that a vastly more expensive set of medical interventions might not do as much or more good. But health experts appear to believe that it is likely to have a marginally positive effect.
The situation with dogs is only different if (1) you value a dog more than a chicken (and I don't) or (2) you are a health expert with good evidence that some neglected effect with cause this action to backfire. If all you've got is "They're killing dogs! Just like Mao killed people!", please go away and find a better argument.
Posted by: David Wright at Aug 6, 2006 8:18:22 PM
David Wright: Suppose it were possible to save one baby somewhere by killing all the dogs in the whole world. Would that be worth it? If not, there's some threshold value of N for which the lives of N dogs is worth more than the value of 1 person. I think that's a perfectly reasonable position.
If on the other hand you think the value of any human life is worth more than anything else, then you disapprove of the career choices of everyone around you who isn't saving lives. There should be no movies or novels or chocolate factories; such pursuits are wastes of human lives that could have been saved if the resources involved had been used differently. I think that position is untenable.
The question of whether China did the right thing by slaughtering 5,000 animals to save a few hypothetical human rabies victims depends on the expected number of rabies victims and on your dog / person exchange rate. Both numbers are matters of opinion, but it's unreasonable for the latter number to be infinite.
Posted by: Jeff Brown at Aug 6, 2006 8:58:53 PM
David Wright,
I compared Anonymous' flippant attitude towards killing dogs (we can quickly replace them) to Mao's attitude towards killing people, because the casual attitudes were so similar. But I found it much, much more shocking that Mao felt that way about his own people than that an outsider (or anyone) felt that way about the dogs.
In terms of policy, I compared the mass slaughter of dogs today to that of sparrows earlier because in both cases, my guess is that it wasn't thought out. Killing most of the sparrows was stupid and had many unintended consequences. There have been many examples since then of the Chinese government making quick, knee-jerk choices that caused more problems than they solved.
In the 1990s, including a short time after the Handover, I was teaching at a university in Hong Kong, and we were all pressured to use Chinese examples in class as much as possible. So, I discussed the Chinese development of their debt markets - issuing a bunch of government bonds, then deciding that debt was un-Communist and so they wouldn't pay it back; more recently issuing 3 year bonds and then, just as the principal was due, turning them into perpetuities and feeling generous that they were willing to continue paying interest; there were many examples of their carelessness, arrogance and unwillingness to be bothered by reality.
Another example was satellite TV. Legally, only foreigners are supposed to watch subversive news sources such as the BBC - it's supposed to be available only in upscale hotels and in condos aimed at foreigners. But some government bureaucrat got greedy several years ago and forced all providers to go through one satellite source that was presumably owned by a Party member's son or cousin. It turned out that the one provider was so technologically backwards that it was suddenly much easier for everyone to steal satellite signals, so far more people were getting outside news not due to government generosity but to government greed and incompetence.
Another example - China has had a massive problem with bad loans in their banking system for well over a decade. Their strategy was to grow their way out of it, hoping that the problem would just kind of go away as their economy grew. But they never made any changes to their banking system except to tell them to broaden beyond State-Owned Enterprise lending, so the banks have been busy all this time making bad consumer loans. It's hard to grow your way out of a problem that you're quickly making bigger.
I could go on and on. Their 5 year plans made every single mistake that is commonly warned against in introductory finance and economics textbooks (in one 5 year plan, they rewarded state-owned enterprises based on the volume of output, without any adjustment for its value; gee, who could possibly have predicted that production of low quality items that no one wanted would skyrocket?).
So, I wasn't comparing killing dogs to killing people. I was comparing killing dogs as a quick, brainless policy response to killing sparrows as another quick, brainless response. Perhaps this time it was a well thought out, well reasoned response. But that seems unlikely, given their long track record. It was only a few years ago that the management of most companies in China had to spend most of the summer in struggle sessions (although no one got beaten to death, as in the Cultural Revolution).
This response (let's hunt down dogs and club them to death on the streets) seemed all too similar to the usual mindless dictatorial response that the Chinese Communist Party has provided through the years. I stand by my claim that the policy of clubbing dogs to death in front of their owners is similar to the earlier policy of trying to make loud noises to scare the sparrows, so that they would continue to fly until they died of exhaustion. Does that sound like a well-reasoned, tested strategy?
Posted by: Ann at Aug 6, 2006 9:36:20 PM
FYI, to the people on both sides of the debate here, in the Atlanta area alone about 90,000 dogs and cats are euthanized a year, and estimates for the US as a whole are 9-10 million a year. Charity begins at home for anyone horrifying by the killing of a mere 50,000 overseas.
David Wright, this story immediately made me think of Mao, not for its cruelty, but for its Great-Leap-Forward/sparrow killing level of delusion. Considering that Yunan Province has a population of 40 million humans, roughly 10x more than the Atlanta area, I would be shocked if 50,000 was more than 3% of the local dog population.
What I really want to know, though, is if they are planning to bludgeon all the bats and squirrels to death, too. You don't need to be a health expert to see the flaw in this plan.
Posted by: DK at Aug 6, 2006 9:40:31 PM
Anon reporting -- there are lots of different reasons people in this thread seem to be mad at China. Communism is bad, sparrows are good, you love dogs, et cetera. But I have to say, from a public health standpoint, killing animals to control infectious diseases is de rigeur. They already do it for chickens, why not dogs? (I reject all crazy ideas about the moral equivalence of dogs and people, especially when the equivalence does not extend to birds, deer, coyotes, etc... )
DK brings up an excellent point: Atlanta kills 90,000 dogs a year. (Remember when Sherman burnt down Atlanta? American government never changes.../sarcasm) He uses this to deduce that this campaign is ineffective, not because it is so brutally and overdone, but because it is such a paltry number compared to the province of Yunnan. But remember, this is not a campaign in Yunnan, but in a county of Yunnan. So the culling could be on a very reasonable scale.
Posted by: anon at Aug 6, 2006 11:02:49 PM
No one has said that killing dogs is the equivalent of killing people - I only compared it to killing sparrows, and I was commenting on the logic of the policy, not the morality. Anon and others are saying that it is conceivable that this was a well thought out policy, and that the government has sound reason to believe that beating dogs to death on the street is more effective than vaccination. Do you have any evidence of this?
If owners could be offered the opportunity to kill their dogs themselves, couldn't they have been offered the opportunity to have them vaccinated? Surely allowing owners to vaccinate their dogs at their own expense would be cheaper than paying owners 5 yuan each to kill their dogs, or is my math (0 < 5) off somehow?
The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of making sudden, unsound decisions, and this history is consistent with the inherent weaknesses of dictatorial, repressive regimes. In the last decadeor so the Chinese government has created a huge AIDs crisis because they felt that screening blood was just too expensive to bother with, and only a few years ago they lied about SARS. The penalties still range from long prison terms to death (and then they sell your organs) for anyone caught releasing accurate figures on the number of AIDS cases.
So, your position seems to be that it's possible that they actually thought through this plan of clubbing dogs to death on the streets in front of their owners. I'm saying that it sounds eerily familiar to the sparrow plan, and that it's more likely that it was a sudden whim. What is standard practice in dealing with rabies in most countries - beating dogs to death in public, or vaccination?
Posted by: Ann at Aug 7, 2006 9:41:35 AM
God, I hate the western media.
"Oh my god! The Chinese are beating puppy dogs to death! Right in front of their owners!"
From firsthand experience, I can tell you that dogs have a much different role in Chinese villages than they do in suburban America. Dogs aren't family members. They're used for protection. Like most dogs that aren't pets, villagers beat them so that they've got a mean streak and make for better guard dogs.
So if rabies is a problem, I don't think anyone would find a dispute with getting rid of some dogs. Maybe the policy went a little overboard, but to find a moral objection would just be absurd.
Posted by: Chris at Aug 7, 2006 10:57:39 AM
If someone broke into my house with the intent to destroy my very valuable property (pet, or computer, or car, etc.), I would use self defense (legally owned firearm) to nullify that threat. Does it make it different who that "someone" is? (I mean, unless America is an entirely docile population by now, in which case, *sigh*)
I think the moral outrage comes from not just the killing of dogs, but the killing of dogs that are someone's particular property. This, however, is given my American context in which family pets are highly valued; Chris has given us reason to think animals are valued differently in China.
Of course it's the *principle* of the thing, largely. If some government thug came to my door and demanded that I bring my microwave outside to be smashed, there might be a scuffle and definitely some words exchanged. Just sayin'.
Posted by: Currence at Aug 7, 2006 12:24:50 PM
Currence: In numerous cases, in the United States and western Europe, animals that are someone's valuable property have been killed by the government for public health reasons. Mad cow disease, for example.
The primary objection that you seem to have left is how this was done, i.e. with clubs in front of owners instead of euthenasia behind closed doors. First off, I wouldn't be entirely confident that a sensation-happy media would get that part right. More importantly, "sensitivity" in such an operation is an expensive luxury. China is not rich. A club is a lot cheaper than a euthenasia operation.
Posted by: David Wright at Aug 7, 2006 2:12:27 PM
Again, David Wright, you're entirely side-stepping the question of why they couldn't have been vaccinated instead. Do you have any evidence that killing all the dogs while entirely ignoring any other possible carriers is the best way to deal with rabies?
Posted by: Ann at Aug 7, 2006 10:39:25 PM
The crazy thing is, they even killed the dogs that were already vaccinnated against rabies, on the ground that the vaccination is not 100% effective. This is the worst possible thing to do for the reasons Ann outlined -- there is no way the slaughter is going to cover more than a few percent of the animals, so rabies is not going to get wiped out anyhow. The only way to make sure the animals people frequently come in contact with are rabies free is through vaccination. And now in one fell swoop, you've killed all the vaccinated animals and sent a message that it is ineffective. Are the owners going to spend good money vaccinating their new pets now? I doubt it.
By the way, don't assume that all the dogs that were killed were not loved. There are reports of owners covering their eyes as their dogs are siezed and beaten to death right in front of them with big sticks. I doubt that was the case with any of the animals euthanized in the U.S.
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