As a child, Ms Wang Zheng, now 45, had longed for a pet..
As a child, Ms Wang Zheng, now 45, had longed for a pet.
But her parents did not allow her to have any as they thought of pets as troublesome and dirty. She was left with playing with the neighbours’ cats instead.
So when she saw that her daughter, an only child, also had a liking for animals, Ms Wang decided to get a pet dog for the family 19 months ago. It would keep Letong, now 13, company and help relieve her schoolwork pressure, she thought.
« Pang Hei keeps Letong company when she does her homework, » she said of the schnauzer-poodle mix that she adopted from a neighbour’s litter for a token sum of 600 yuan (S$122) .
Ms Wang is among a growing number of middle-class Chinese, including the residents of Beijing, who have taken to keeping dogs as pets. Growing affluence and the now defunct one-child policy have been drivers of this trend.
The Communist Party had frowned on the practice as elitist and Beijing banned dogs in 1983, after they started to appear in households after the Cultural Revolution.
When Beijing lifted the ban on dog ownership in 2002,140,000 dogs were registered. By 2012, that number had jumped to 1.2 million and then to two million by last year.
But with only 50 to 60 per cent of dogs within the city limits registered, and virtually all of those in the suburbs unregistered, the real number of dogs owned by Beijingers could be between four and six million, Ms Mary Peng, chief executive officer of an animal hospital, said at a recent forum on animal welfare. Beijing has 21.5 million residents.
Nationwide, there are an estimated 62 million registered dogs.
Yet, at the same time that more Chinese are keeping dogs as pets, more are also eating dog meat, according to Professor Guo Peng of Shandong University, who researches animal ethics.
This is because dog meat is relatively cheaper than other meats, she told the same forum.
The reason is not that it is cheap to rear a dog, as any canine owner would attest. Rather, it is because most dogs being sold in Chinese markets for their meat have been stolen from their owners.
A live dog sells for an average of 5 yuan per jin (500g) , Prof Guo said in a written interview with The Sunday Times, while it is 3 yuan to 4 yuan for a dead canine.
