Beggars put last straw on camel's back

Beggars are using emaciated camels in Foshan, Guangdong province, to exploit people's compassion to get alms, a person recently wrote in his micro blog. Such scenes, however, are not restricted to Foshan, for since early this year beggars have been using ill-fed camels in several major cities, including Guangzhou and Shenzhen in Guangdong province and Xiamen in Fujian province, to seek alms.

Photographs of such camels, forced to kneel down by their "owner" beggars in an attempt to trigger people's sympathy, have drawn widespread condemnation, especially from netizens.

Many people have even asked whether the beggars deliberately ill-treated the camels or chopped their hooves off to make them look more miserable and thus earn more money. Even if the beggars have not done so, the fact that they are forcing the camels to kneel down on the hard road surface for long hours and not feeding them properly are enough to cause great physical harm to the animals.