China’s Progress on Becoming “Civilized”

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post called "Chinese Want to Become ‘Civilized.’" Then last week, the Chinese government beat 50,000 PET dogs to death over five days rather than vaccinate them against rabies, as reported by every news organization including: The New York Times, Fox News, and ABC News, which included a photo of officials beating a dog to death. Official offered dog owners 63 cents (60, by some reports) to kill the animals themselves, and if they didn’t, the officials beat the dogs to death on the spot. Only police dogs were spared.

Several Animal Person readers wrote to me, wondering why I didn’t comment on the story, and at first I thought: What can I say? Everyone reported it, no one used the word "euthanasia" (I was particularly pleased that Fox News used "exterminate"), and I’m just so upset about China’s policies across-the-board that I don’t know where to begin.

But then I remembered a fantastic article by Dr. Michael W. Fox, veterinarian, ethicist, author, and first to get into heaven if there is one.

Dr. Fox writes of a Cognitive and Affective Developmental Disorder he calls "Animal-Insensitivity Syndrome," which manifests in the form of factory farms (which he calls "animal concentration camps"), among other things (like maybe beating dogs to death?).

He enlists the help of Richard Louv, author of LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, in explaining how when we treat the living Earth and its nonhuman inhabitants as if they are without feeling, we eventually limit our capacity to empathize with others. And it is not a long trip from lack of empathy to, as Fox writes, "deliberate torture and calculated cruelty either perpetrated alone or in participation with others, as in the name of entertainment, sport, quasi-religious or cult ritual, and as some see it, experimental vivisection." (See Boycott Spain, Barbaro Made Me Do It, and Spain Makes US Greyhounds Feel Lucky.) 

What we have here in the US is children who have grown up/are growing up desensitized to the pain of others. And that’s tragic. But China has an entire government of grown-ups who–from their actions–appear to lack empathy entirely. That’s tragic, too, but it’s also far more dangerous.

My fear is that with the acceptance of experimental vivisection, factory farming, rodeos, dog and horse racing, animal-based circuses, fur, and hunting-as-a-sport, and with government subsidizing of some of these, we could soon be on our way to justifying something like: "euthanizing" dogs due to their health risk to humans.