2008 Woodie Awards
Dog mandate eerily familiar
Erika Prins, Staff Writer
Issue date: 11/21/06
Last Updated: 12/26/07
China has recently begun strictly enforcing a three-year-old policy restricting residents in Beijing to owning one small dog. The mandate has been dubbed the "one-dog policy," alluding to the "one-child policy" that former Chinese Communist leader Deng Xiaoping enacted to counteract the sharp increase in China's population under his predecessor, Mao Zedong.
Why the comparison? It seems tasteless to compare regulating dog ownership to regulating child-bearing, but the policies bear some troubling similarities.
Animal-rights activists now criticize the one-dog policy for the same reason that human rights groups have been criticizing the one-child policy for decades. The policies attempt to solve very real social issues, but the coercive approach violates peoples' rights. Policies based on voluntary compliance and positive incentives could achieve the same goals without many of the negative side-effects of using force.
"We believe it's a policy that is misplaced in that the focus should be on rabies vaccination rather than a limitation on the number of dogs in a household," said Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States. "One thing we have learned in the United States is that large-scale vaccination programs aimed at reducing and eradicating rabies programs do work in large nations."
The one-dog policy aims to curb a rabies problem. The government figures that, since Beijing has a lot of un-vaccinated dogs, the number of un-vaccinated dogs should be reduced. Tightly controlling the number of dogs and their vaccination records is expected to fix the problem.
In the case of the one-child policy, China's hurting infrastructure and economy simply could not sustain the population increase encouraged by Zedong. The solution was to "encourage" urban families to have only one child and rural families to have no more than two.
"Encouragement," with both policies, means strict regulation and enforcement that violates peoples' rights. The one-child policy's enforcement involved forced sterilizations and abortions among other similarly invasive approaches. Under the one-dog policy, dogs have been beaten to death in front of their owners in some places and abruptly seized by the police in others.
Why the comparison? It seems tasteless to compare regulating dog ownership to regulating child-bearing, but the policies bear some troubling similarities.
Animal-rights activists now criticize the one-dog policy for the same reason that human rights groups have been criticizing the one-child policy for decades. The policies attempt to solve very real social issues, but the coercive approach violates peoples' rights. Policies based on voluntary compliance and positive incentives could achieve the same goals without many of the negative side-effects of using force.
"We believe it's a policy that is misplaced in that the focus should be on rabies vaccination rather than a limitation on the number of dogs in a household," said Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States. "One thing we have learned in the United States is that large-scale vaccination programs aimed at reducing and eradicating rabies programs do work in large nations."
The one-dog policy aims to curb a rabies problem. The government figures that, since Beijing has a lot of un-vaccinated dogs, the number of un-vaccinated dogs should be reduced. Tightly controlling the number of dogs and their vaccination records is expected to fix the problem.
In the case of the one-child policy, China's hurting infrastructure and economy simply could not sustain the population increase encouraged by Zedong. The solution was to "encourage" urban families to have only one child and rural families to have no more than two.
"Encouragement," with both policies, means strict regulation and enforcement that violates peoples' rights. The one-child policy's enforcement involved forced sterilizations and abortions among other similarly invasive approaches. Under the one-dog policy, dogs have been beaten to death in front of their owners in some places and abruptly seized by the police in others.
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