ShareThisGUANGZHOU, China - For decades, China's citizens have lived with the controversial one-child regime imposed on them by the government. Now, pet lovers in this southern factory city are frothing over the latest official intrusion into their lives: a one-dog policy.
The new rule, which limits dog ownership to one per family, was introduced in July by the Guangzhou government as part of a campaign to clean up the city and eradicate rabies before next fall, when the city will host the 16th Asian Games.
Suddenly, going for a walk with a pair of pooches could get the unregistered one seized and the owner slapped with a fine of 2,000 yuan (about $300). The law also aims to encourage dog registration by lowering the fee from 10,000 yuan to 500.
But just as families go to enormous and creative lengths to circumvent the one-child rule, the new restriction on dog ownership has spawned a host of plots by multi-dog families looking to keep their precious pups on the sly.
Dogs were once much more likely to appear on a menu in Guangzhou than at the end of a leash in a park. But dog ownership -- condemned as bourgeois by Mao Zedong -- has skyrocketed in recent decades, especially among the city's elderly.
While some have complied with the new rules and handed their surplus dogs over to the Public Security Bureau and an uncertain fate, others have smuggled their canine companions to the countryside or hidden them with relatives. Still others have merely moved their dogs around on paper, registering them as belonging to friends and neighbors while keeping them right at home and out of sight.
"You can just register them with another family and still have them at your house," said Yan Junfeng, the 27-year-old owner of a pet-supplies-and-grooming store.
Yan, whose store sells publications such as Pets Magazine and frilly coats for dogs in a city where the weather is warm almost year round, says he has only one dog, but admits he'd go to great lengths to avoid official detection if he had more. He said his store's sales of purebred toy poodles have dropped only slightly since the new law came into force.
"The law is a bad idea. It will increase the number of strays," said Yan's wife, who gave her name as Mercury. "People are trying every means to keep their dogs."
The new law also prohibits all dogs more than 28 inches in height in the city center, which has bred fears of a mass roundup of large dogs. Though that hasn't happened so far, an unnamed police officer was quoted by the official Xinhua news agency when the new rules were introduced, suggesting that residents could send pets to the security bureau to be "disposed" of, and warning that illegal animals would be seized by the authorities.
A similar one-dog policy was adopted in Beijing several years ago during the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, and was followed by mass culls of thousands of unregistered and unvaccinated dogs.
Dog-killing campaigns are regular occurrences in China, where more than 2,000 people die each year from rabies.
Feng Dongmei, the Guangzhou-based manager of an animal-rights group called Animals Asia, said the new rules haven't been strictly enforced to date in Guangzhou. She said her group has been working with the government to focus on the aim of increasing dog registration.
Because of the high cost, only 800 of an estimated 100,000 pet dogs in the city were registered before the new rules came into effect July 1. However, 21,000 owners have reportedly registered their dogs since then.
Many owners are resigned to complying with the new rules, even if they don't agree with them.
"My brother had seven small dogs and he's giving them all away," said Li Changjiang, a 60-year-old who was walking along the bank of the Pearl River one evening, pushing a wheelchair shared by his elderly mother and her beloved white Pekinese. "He was very sad at first, but he chose the dog he loved most and kept that one."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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