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Animal cruelty law not acceptable
By Chen Weihua
Updated: 2009-08-11 00:00
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The comment by Zheng Huiqiang, deputy director of the Standing Committee of Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress, one day after a meeting held by the local legislature on pet dog management and attended by officers from the city police department, is full of words like don’ts and bans.
Pet dogs, Zheng argues, should be forbidden from entering subways, shopping malls, supermarkets, elevators and other public places. It is not sure if Zheng, by putting elevators on the list, believes that people should only take the stairs to their apartments on the 30th floor after walking their dogs.
Zheng, also vice-president of the prestigious Tongji University, is not only no pet lover, but also discriminated against pet owners when he opposes lowering pet licensing fees by saying that if pet owners do not reach a certain level of living standards, owning a pet animal will be a burden for themselves and others. That is like saying that if you are not rich enough, you are not even entitled to have a pet cat or dog.
Zheng is not alone. Words from another lawmaker, Deng Zixin, are more disturbing. Ironically, a life science scientist at Shanghai Jiaotong University, Deng was quoted as saying that pet dogs bring pleasure to only a few people while causing harm and trouble to the majority.
Deng should probably do a fieldwork about what a great friend and companion pet animals are to human beings, and how, when loneliness is a top concern for the city’s huge aging population, companion cats and dogs could be a good solution.
This said, I am not arguing at all for total freedom for pets and their owners. Regulations on pet animals are absolutely necessary, but they should stipulate as much about rights as about obligations. Pet animals, too, should have their rights.
In fact, most of the complaints about pet animals these days are not about pets, but about their owners and the rules not being enforced.
At all time, pet owners bear the obligation to clean their pets’ waste and make sure their dogs don’t bark excessively and don’t attack unless overly provoked. This is no easy job given the widespread public disregard of a code of conduct in our society. It’s not even possible to prohibit parents from letting their infants and young children urinate on our streets and in parks, or banning adults from spitting and littering at random.
The lax enforcement of the current regulation in Shanghai has only aggravated the problems. For example, licensed dogs, which numbered 164,000 in Shanghai in 2008, have been treated no differently than unlicensed ones, whose population is estimated several times higher.
The police department, which collects 1,000 yuan ($147) to 2,000 yuan annually from each licensed dog owner in the city center, has never revealed where the money goes, and why the call for building pet animal parks has never been considered.
It is heartbreaking to see that while Americans are obsessed with the inauguration of the Portuguese water dog Bo as the country’s First Dog, news in China has been either about a total ban of pet dogs in Heihe, Heilongjiang province, the slaughter of more than 30,000 dogs in Hanzhong, Shaanxi province after a dozen people died of rabies, or the new one-dog-per-family policy in Guangzhou.
In a harmonious society, laws on animals should deal with their welfare and rights, and should by no means be a cruelty law. The laws should never be dictated by pet animal haters.