Officials said that 16 people had died of rabies after dog bites in the eastern city of Jining in the past eight months and all dogs living within three miles (5km) of areas where rabies had been found would be killed.

The Year of the Dog may be auspicious for weddings and babies, but the country’s canines are being less fortunate. Rabies has been reported in 16 villages within the municipal area of Jining, where more than 500,000 dogs live as pets or guard dogs. Dogs in other areas will be vaccinated.

The latest culls have triggered heated debate between dog lovers and those who say the safety of human beings must come first. Last week officials in southeastern Yunnan province clubbed, electrocuted or hanged more than 50,000 dogs in a cull denounced by animal rights activists.

One woman was walking her small white dog near her home in Mouding county in Yunnan when several men approached her. They persuaded her to hand them the lead and then beat her pet to death while she watched. Only military dogs guarding an ammunition storehouse and police dogs were spared the slaughter.

To hunt dogs being protected by their owners, the culling squads would go out into the streets of Mouding after darkness banging pots and pans and letting off fireworks to frighten the animals into barking. The men would then kill their quarry.

Officials ordered the cull because three people, including a four-year-old girl, have died of rabies in the province since April. This year 360 of the province’s 200,000 people have been bitten by dogs. A campaign to vaccinate the animals could not keep pace and officials decided on more decisive action.

Pet owners were offered 40 pence to slaughter their pets, then task force officers were sent to find those that had been spared. After the public outrage at the killings in Yunnan, officials in eastern Jining have ordered a media blackout on the cull, giving permission only to one local newspaper to send its reporters to write about the slaughter.

Zhang Luping, founder of the Beijing Human and Animal Environmental Education Centre, said the culling should stop: “This really damages our national image and sets a really bad example to show how lazy and inconsiderate those local government officials are.” Cases of rabies are on the rise in China, with more than 2,500 people reported to have died of the disease in 2004. Only 3 per cent of China’s dogs are vaccinated.

Pet ownership, shunned during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution as a bourgeois pastime, has become increasingly popular in the past few years.

Dogs are popular as companions among the elderly and as status symbols among a class of newly rich middle class. Beijing alone has 400,000 dogs.

• Forty farmers and ten policemen were injured during a riot by 2,000 villagers over corruption in Liaoning province, northeast China. The protesters were angry over officials keeping funds given by an iron mine for residents to build a road. In eastern China thousands are fasting over the arrest of more than 50 underground Christians after the demolition of a church in the Xiaoshan district. (AFP)

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