50,000 dogs were beaten to death in China this week. Government officials ordered the cull after three people died of rabies.

Dogs being walked were forcibly taken from their owner’s leashes and battered to death on the spot. Pets hidden indoors were flushed out at night by club-carrying men roaming the villages, yelling and screaming in order to set dogs barking. Distraught dog owners were offered 40 pence in compensation.

Authorities estimate 90% of the province’s dog population were slaughtered during the 5-day campaign. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) called the hound holocaust “hideously cruel“.

But this comes as no surprise. The Chinese government seems to specialise in such extreme, over-simplified reactions…

In 1958 Chairman Mao Zedong came up with a corker: The Anti-Sparrow Campaign. Because sparrows eat grain, he concluded that agricultural productivity would increase if all sparrows were exterminated.

Killing sparrows is pretty straightforward, especially if you have a couple of million Chinese peasants to order around. Y’see, sparrows have heart attacks if they fly for 15 minutes without landing. So armies of peasants were forced to go out into the fields and bang on pots and pans and shout, in order to scare the birds into the air. 15 cacophonous minutes later, it’s raining sparrows.

Billions of birds were killed in this way – there are pictures of proud villagers posing beside thirty-foot-high mountains of sparrow carcasses. Agricultural production boomed that year. But these immediate successes were dwarfed by the catastrophe that was to follow.

Mao forgot that as well as grain, sparrows also eat locusts. Without any sparrows to eat the locusts, the locusts went loco. A biblical swarm ravaged the Chinese countryside the following year, contributing in no small part to a famine that killed 30 million people.

Oooops!

The latest anti-dog campaign won’t have such disasterous consequences as mutts aren’t such an important link in the food chain. Though the price of dog meat and dog fur in local markets has crashed.

DOM TUNON