Puppycide and mass-puppycide

They're Man's Best Friend, furry balls of love, loyalty and companionship. Yet it seems if they get in the way in even the most marginal way, we pop them like...well...dogs.

The Agitator finds more instances of dogs killed by cops. The owners had let 32 parking tickets accumulate over his broken-down vehicle and the cops were serving a warrant for his arrest. Instead, two of his three dogs bought it.

Our second case of puppycide today is on a much larger scale. The Chinese government has decreed that all the dogs in Muding county of Yunnan be exterminated in an attempt to curb a rabies outbreak that has killed three people. That's more than 50,000 dogs!

Owners were ordered to kill their pets or face having teams of local police and other enforcement officers kill them, it said. Even the 4,292 dogs in the county that had been immunized against rabies were ordered put to death, as authorities said the immunizations were not 100 percent effective, the report said.

From January through July, 360 people in the county had been bitten by dogs, with the three human deaths occurring since April, the Beijing Times said. Some owners have used methods including hanging their dogs, electrocuting them and clubbing them to death, while others used drugs, the Beijing News said.

Yes, the immunizations are not 100% effective, but I bet it's close. There is no point quibbling with the infinitesimal chance of vaccine failure, because any extermination is unlikely to be complete anyhow. There are bound to be hidden family pets and strays who escape the extermination, not to mention all those non-canine while animals who can carry rabies. But even if every single rabid animal in Yunnan was killed, the extermination will still be a fatuous effort because there are lots of rabid animals elsewhere in China. The leviathan panicked and the result was mass-puppycide.