COMMUNIST CHINA is slowly coming around to the deeply bourgeois idea of man’s best friend as a pet, but the same population rules that limit parents to one offspring will soon be applied to dog owners, as Shanghai brings in the one-pooch policy.
During the hardline communist era of Mao Zedong, pets were frowned on as a middle-class affectation – government opponents were condemned as capitalist running dogs and pet dogs were not tolerated.
However, China’s growing openness, combined with its rising affluence, means pets are making a comeback; there are now about 100 million pet dogs in China. They don’t exist without restrictions, however.
This is a bureaucratic exercise – keeping the city’s unlicensed dogs on a leash. There are four times as many dogs without the proper paperwork in Shanghai as there are animals with a permit.
Dogs kept within the fourth ring ring road encircling the capital must be less than 34cm high. Eating dog, common in the northeast, is now frowned upon, but keeping tabs on a burgeoning canine population is proving difficult.
With a population of more than 20 million people making it China’s biggest city, Shanghai suffers from high population density and increasingly cramped living conditions. This means that pets must pay – city authorities have drafted new laws that limit each household to one dog.
According to official data, there are about 800,000 pet dogs in Shanghai, although only a quarter of these are registered and licensed. The growing risks of dog attacks, as well as rampant barking and waste littering, which affect the city’s environment and sanitation, has sparked calls for stronger regulation by the government.
Shanghai residents see the issue as a broader one than sheer numbers – they believe the government needs to formulate a proper policy when it comes to pet pooches.
“If you can’t find any adopters and the shelters are full, where would the puppies go?” one elderly woman, who has been raising a dog for six years, told the China Daily.
The rule has also been imposed in Guangzhou in the south and Chengdu in the southwest.
Another dog lover surnamed Wang said: “The government should improve public knowledge about how to raise a dog and how to prevent them from attacking people and littering instead of forcing us to raise one dog only.”
The draft legislation requires dog owners to give away any puppies or send them to government-approved adoption agencies by the time they are three months old, so as to abide by the one-dog policy. The alternative is for owners to have sterilisation surgery performed on their dogs.
This sounds harsh, but it is in line with the one-child policy for humans, imposed in 1979 as a way of reining in population growth already running at dangerously high levels in the world’s most populous nation. In the early 1980s, there was widespread sterlisation, especially among women in the countryside. The National Population and Family Planning Commission reckons some 400 million human births have been prevented by the policy.
Regulators in Shanghai meanwhile are thinking of lowering the exorbitant cost of dog licences and registration.