This article is from WeChat official account:Story FM (ID: story_fm ), narrator: Yin Hang, producer: Xu Linfeng, text: Xu Linfeng, operation: Yichen, title picture from: original text
Do you have any scary memories of dogs? For most people, stray dogs on the street are far from scary, you may find them more cute or pitiful. But today’s narrator Yin Hang, the group of stray dogs she has to face is not the same as our impression.
In recent years, a very serious stray dog problem has broken out in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The stray dogs here generally have the ancestry of Tibetan mastiffs. A large body weighs more than 100 catties. A few dogs can fight with brown bears together. They are also very large in number, often appearing in hundreds of cities and towns. Yin Hang has worked in Qinghai for 11 years. During these 11 years, she has been concerned about the local human-dog conflict. She witnessed a series of vicious events that occurred when thousands of large dogs competed with humans for living space.
1. The other side under the moonlight
Basically around 2014, if you go to the monastery, you will definitely see stray dogs.
Once, I lived in a monastery to investigate. Before going to bed, all the dog barks linger in the ears. At this time, the people in the monastery also exhorted them to not go out at night. I am definitely afraid to go out! The dogs changed completely at night. Their voices were very terrifying, with a brutal force that would occupy the entire night, and made me feel that if I went out, a dog would pounce on me and tear me apart.
■ Stray dogs outside the temple
In fact, there was a little girl who was in elementary school in the local area. She was bitten to death by a bitch while going to the toilet at night. She had already had one leg eaten when she was found.
It’s so cruel, I never thought that “dog hurts people” can be extreme.
Later, When we visited, we learned that there were even stray dogs snatching children from women. And similar malignant events are not uncommon. It can happen on this land at any time.
So we set out to shoot a documentary about “stray dogs in Tibetan areas”. Once, we followed a stray dog and recorded its day. The dog is so big that he wandered around the city all day and found nothing to eat. At this time, there was a scene that shocked me so far. It is close to a child about two years old. The child stood by his scooter in shock, and suddenly, he started screaming.
I have never heard a kid call that way. He may have used all his strength, and I can feel his trembling. Maybe the dog was also deterred by the barking, so he hung his head and walked away. But from seeing the dog until it was far away, the child kept screaming and barked for more than 5 minutes.
He must learn to protect himself in this way since he was young.
At that time, I looked at these dogs again, they were no longer like friends, they were more like beasts. And it is a beast that lives around us. what should we do?
■ When the child is standing on the street, there is a dog who is bigger than him not far away
2. Where does the dog come from
There are too many questions waiting to be answered. In 2014, I created a charity organization called “Xuejing” to focus on resolving the conflict between humans and animals. The human-dog conflict in Tibetan areas has become our most important project. The first question we have to figure out is, where do so many stray dogs come from?
Actually, as early as the 1980s, overseas speculation about the Tibetan Mastiff economy began. The Tibetan Mastiff is considered to be a rare species on the mysterious Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, symbolizing might and dignity. Many wealthy people began to yearn to have such a dog. Under the influence of this external culture, in the 21st century, the Tibetan mastiff market in the interior has also become popular. Around 2010, the Tibetan Mastiff has been fired to a sky-high price, and it is not uncommon for a transaction price to exceed one million. In addition, there were many sensational incidents at that time. For example, a Xi’an boss once organized 30 Mercedes Benz to pick up the plane for his dog. A mastiff garden in Shandong also bought the Tibetan Mastiff “Great Emperor” for 10 million.
■ A piece of news about “Millions worth of Tibetan mastiff turned into hot pot ingredients”
According to our research, in the Yushu area and Guoluo area of Qinghai, when the market is booming, there are dozens of breeding centers of various sizes around a city.There are hundreds of them. At that time, in order to raise huge Tibetan mastiffs to sell them at high prices, many owners adopted the method of feeding, which was to pour the food directly in. If you put food in front of such a dog, it will not eat, because it can no longer eat normally.
In the counties around Yushu City, more than 90% of the people raise one or two Tibetan mastiffs. But 90% of dogs have no market. Because the vast majority of ordinary people have no way to directly meet people who want to buy Tibetan mastiffs, it is the breeding centers that really make money.
Butin 2013, the bubble in the Tibetan Mastiff market began to burst. Many Tibetan mastiffs in breeding gardens cannot be sold anymore, and no one wants to give them away for free. Investors who follow suit can only sell Tibetan mastiffs before they completely bottom out, or even treat them as meat dogs. For a time, the price of Tibetan mastiffs plummeted, breeding centers closed down, and a large number of stray dogs flooded the streets and wilderness.
Of course, this is only the first link in this chain.
Under the influence of local religious concepts, Tibetan dogs are basically not sterilized. The appearance of stray dogs has begun to cause the Tibetan mastiffs raised by ordinary people to become pregnant frequently and uncontrollably. But the common people are unable to raise so many dogs. In desperation, they can only join this cycle and begin to abandon the puppies.
But killing is another local cultural taboo. The people don’t want these dogs to starve to death, so they will abandon the dogs in places with a lot of food, such as temples, towns, or grasslands with abundant wildlife.
This has catalyzed the further expansion of the number of stray dogs.
■ A stray dog shelter in Yushu
3. How many dogs
As soon as these dogs return to nature and release their instincts, they will be very spiritual! They can prey and reproduce by themselves. There are three or four Tibetan dogs with fewer births, There are more than thirteen and fourteen. The average dog may have to breed twice a year. Calculating this way, two adult dogs can breed 38 dogs after three years, which is 19 times more than before!
Later, a local asylum center was built, with an area the size of two or three football fields. In five days, everyone rushed the stray dogs from the three townships to the shelter and collected nearly 1,000. Far more than we thought.
The scenes of these dogs grabbing food are also shocking. In an area about half the size of a football field, black and dense, piled together, all dogs.
These are only 3 townships. There are 6 counties in Yushu Prefecture, and each county has about 5 townships. Do you think about the situation of 30 township associations? The same goes for Guo Luo. And Tibet is worse than Qinghai. When a colleague of mine went to investigate and found that a reception center in Lhasa with a limit of 1,000 dogs actually received 8,000 dogs. Lhasa produces seven or eight thousand stray dogs every year. Only in Lhasa!
This matter must be resolved.
■ The pictures of feeding in the containment center
4. Can hunting solve the problem?
But, how to solve it?
According to a survey conducted by the Asian Animal Foundation, the average collection capacity of domestic shelters is around 400. Like Yushu and Lhasa, the situation where there are thousands of stray dogs at every turn is extremely extreme.
When there are too many stray dogs, in addition to biting and preying on humans and animals, they are also susceptible to rabies and echinococcosis. There are two types of echinococcosis, one is cystic hydatid and the other is alveolar hydatid. Alveolar hydatid is also called echinococcosis, and the lethality rate can reach 94%. The top three regions with echinococcosis incidence in China, Dari County in Qinghai Province, Shiqu County in Sichuan Province, and Chenduo County in Qinghai Province, all have serious problems with stray dogs on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. area.
In the face of stray dogs who are at risk of infectious diseases, the universal method is to kill them. But in Tibetan areas, this approach may not work.
Our survey shows that more than 90% of local people are opposed to hunting stray dogs. This may be related to their religious beliefs.
■ Pictures of Tibetan mastiffs bred by local people/Photo by Zhong Xuelian
About 2016, a local dog got rabies, and the person who was bitten by it died. In order to prevent the spread of the virus, the armed police sent out many stray dogs to kill and landfill. But during our investigation, we encountered a woman who dared not go to the hospital after being bitten by a dog because she was worried that stray dogs would be killed.
There is also a very shocking story. There was a little girl whose half of her face was bitten by a dog. Life was very difficult. If I were her mother, I would have waited for the dog team to kill all the dogs so that my daughter would not be injured again. But when the dog team came, her mother drove all the stray dogs around to her yard to protect them. She was afraid that these dogs would be killed.
It’s hard to say whether she hates these dogs, but she definitely wants these lives to survive. In our interviews, many people have been bitten by dogs, and their cattle and sheep have also been eaten by dogs, but when it comes to the way to treat dogs, they will say “Feed it!”
■ Children and Dogs
5. Fear of “outsiders”
So, by constantly learning about local cultural concepts, I realized that locally, hunting and killing not only cannot solve the problem of stray dogs, it may also make it more serious.
After the killing that I just mentioned, we went to the local area again and there were still many stray dogs on the street. Because this wave of dogs has gone, new dogs have entered its niche. The people will not only continue to feed them, but based on the last “lesson”, they will protect stray dogs more.
For example, when we ask the local people, they will say that those are not stray dogs, they are raised freely. They worry that some people will deal with these dogs by killing them.
On another occasion, we interviewed an old lady who often went to the monastery. The next day, she asked a friend to call and ask, “Did you Han people take the dog away yesterday? There are fewer dogs in our temple!” It can be seen that they are very cautious and jealous of outsiders.
Later, I realized that this fear not only comes from hunting, but also from the dog hunting team. Ironically, the Tibetan Mastiff, which once symbolized noble status, is now an important source of “meat dogs” in China.
■ The Tibetan dog trafficked to the northeast by a dog Picture/Photo taken with him
As far as I know, dog dealers from Sichuan, Henan, and Northeast China will come to Tibetan areas to catch dogs. They have professional dog traps and dog nets, and they usually leave the province with a truck full of dogs.
85″ data-w=”1080″ data-h=”810″>
■ Local monasteries promote the adoption of stray dogs
■ Local people bring their adopted dogs for sterilization
Our first pilot was in June, and the Cordyceps season has not yet ended. Many people were supposed to go up the mountain to dig cordyceps, but learned that we had invited good veterinarians from far away. They all put down the cordyceps and brought their newly adopted dogs from the monastery to the veterinary station for sterilization.
In order to maintain a sterile environment, we do not allow ordinary people to enter the operating room. An old couple, after bringing in the dog that had just been raised for two months, they lay on the paper-pasted window and watched it very seriously and nervously through the seam.
After the dog was brought out, they guarded the dog, prepared water and food for it, and waited until it regained its vitality. The old couple were very happy, I still remember they said happily, “Our dog has been discharged from the hospital and can go home!”
Starting in 2017, we have trained more than 70 local veterinarians and completed more than 700 dog sterilization operations. However, relative to the huge number of stray dogs, this is only a drop in the bucket. But this is local power. They have taken on local responsibilities in their own culture and in a way that they recognize. I fully believe that one day they will be able to deal with the stray dog problem on their own.
Story FM (ID: story_fm), Narrator: Yin Hang, Producer: Xu Linfeng, Text: Xu Linfeng, Operation: Yichen