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.

The charity organization then hired an excavator and, after digging, found six dead dogs, which had "soil in their mouths and noses", and volunteers suspected that local urban management (or chengguan) officers had transferred the dogs' bodies to another secret place.

Local chengguan authorities denied the allegations, saying the chengguan officers temporarily put them in a discarded pit near the garbage dump while they tried to rent a place to keep them permanently.

Though the truth is not yet known, the case has fanned people's passions because it involves vulnerable animals, chengguan officers - who are generally disliked by people - and a possible brutal "mass burial".

While some netizens use the banner of "animal rights' to lash out at the chengguan officers for the "slaughter" of the dogs, others support the local authorities' attempt to keep cities free of stray animals and possible animal attacks. Both sides are right, but they ignore the key point: How to solve the problems created by stray dogs?

Animal rights activists occupy the moral high ground in the debate. Putting innocent dogs or cats to death is brutal, and appreciation of life in all forms is an integral part of traditional Chinese culture.

However, the reality is that China has an estimated 40 million stray dogs and 10 million stray cats, most of them sick or injured. How to deal with such a huge number of animals is a question that has put urban management officers in a quandary. Confounding the problem is the shortage of funds faced by many local governments. Perhaps that's why urban management authorities choose to put some stray animals to "sleep".

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