Dog lovers arrested in rare Beijing protest

[Crossfire Bulldogs]

Michael Sheridan, Beijing / The Australian

In an echo of the days when Chairman Mao denounced his foes as "running dogs", hundreds of angry pet owners confronted the police in Beijing at the weekend to protest the regime's new "one-dog policy".

Eighteen people were arrested in noisy scuffles as about 500 dog owners gathered in a rare unauthorised demonstration near Beijing Zoo. Several of the middle-class protesters wore badges that read "stop the killing" and waved stuffed toys in the hope of softening the hearts of the riot police and plainclothes security men who surrounded them.

Police cordoned off the area, massed hundreds of reinforcements in nearby streets and tried to stop photography and filming.

In cities all over China, dog lovers have been outraged as police have swept through districts killing unlicensed dogs and confiscating others. Only dogs shorter than 36cm are allowed.

The aim is to purge the streets of strays and fight rabies, which claimed 326 lives in China last month. It is the heavy-handed imposition of the rules that has angered pet owners.

The protest was sparked by police raids on an area of luxury villas. According to the state news agency, Xinhua, the security forces discovered six "large unlicensed dogs". Elsewhere, residents have reported seeing policemen beating dogs to death.

For decades, pets were seen as a bourgeois indulgence, redolent of the days when the dowager empress kept a retinue of pekinese. Most pets vanished during the cultural revolution, but there are now 550,000 registered dog owners in Beijing.