Stop throwing your pets to the dogs

Dog lovers and dog haters are like cats and dogs; they will never cease to fight. No wonder the news of about 100 stray dogs being possibly buried alive near a garbage dump in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region has sparked a fierce war of words on the Internet.

The welfare of stray dogs grabbed public attention after Yinchuan Dawn Pets Home, a nongovernmental organization, posted on the Internet photographs of dogs lying in a dusty ditch about 1.8 meters deep.

The animal welfare group investigated the claim of a woman that she had seen the animals trapped in a pit near a garbage dump at Alxa Left Banner, Inner Mongolia, while searching for her pet dog on Wednesday. When some volunteers of the NGO visited the site the following day, they found that the pit had been filled up. A volunteer said the NGO visited the site again on Friday, but by then the dead dogs had apparently been "moved elsewhere" by local officials to hide the truth.