My friend Zhang Feng has a teddy, and he has recently become a pet advocate. The reason is that he wrote an article criticizing the indiscriminate killing of pets by staff of the Chengdu epidemic prevention department. A girl in Chengdu was quaranti...
My friend Zhang Feng has a teddy, and he has recently become a pet advocate. The reason is that he wrote an article criticizing the indiscriminate killing of pets by staff of the Chengdu epidemic prevention department.
A girl in Chengdu was quarantined because her schedule overlapped with that of a confirmed patient. Unexpectedly, during the quarantine period, the staff culled the three cats in her home. This matter seems to be a hot topic. Zhang Feng called on these little lives to be respected and loved during the epidemic prevention process.
Zhang Feng’s article quickly generated more than 100,000 hits, and also attracted the attention of relevant departments in Chengdu. As a result, Zhang Feng deleted the article, and the relevant departments in Chengdu began to seriously consider the issue. According to his latest article, people in the local community will now arrange for pet store personnel to go to the homes of quarantined people to feed their pets.
This is a gratifying result.
However, similar behavior still occurs in other places. For example, another dog beating incident occurred recently in Shangrao, Jiangxi. According to some netizens, after the client went to the hotel for quarantine, staff wearing protective clothing came to the door and "beat my dog with an iron rod."
Because the process of culling the dogs was captured by surveillance cameras, the relevant footage aroused heated discussion online.
Yesterday (November 13) night, the notice issued by Xishi Street, Xinzhou District, Digrao City, where the incident occurred, also proved from the side that "the on-site staff harmlessly disposed of the pet dog without fully communicating with the netizen."
According to the report, the staff member was transferred from the relevant position after being criticized and educated, and was ordered to sincerely apologize to the person involved. "The netizen's understanding has been obtained." In other words, the person whose pet was “harmlessly disposed of” is now “emotionally stable.”
01
This incident has made public an issue that has been ignored since the outbreak. This is, what should we do about pets who have had close contact with confirmed cases, close contacts, and pets infected with the virus?
In fact, this problem should have always existed. Since the outbreak of the epidemic, I believe that this problem has troubled many people, and I think that during the peak period of the epidemic, there must have been more culling of pets than now. This is a simple question of probability.
So why has it become a hot topic and attract widespread attention now? I have to say that there is a problem of setting the agenda of public opinion.
At that time, people were naturally more panicked about the new coronavirus than they are now, and the top priority for all resource mobilization at that time was definitely to prevent the spread of the epidemic and reduce the loss of life.
Many people may still remember that at that time, not to mention household pets such as cats and dogs, the lives of quails on breeding farms were once in danger because they did not know whether they were considered "farmed wild animals".
In fact, at that time, the protection of individual rights could not be well protected. Remember that truck driver who wandered on the highway for many days and could not get off the highway exit?
Similar examples were not uncommon at that time, and I had come across many of them. Among them, the case of "Wenzhou restaurant owner wandering on the expressway for 14 days" that our team was the first to pay attention to has attracted the attention of the entire network. On Baijiahao alone, there are 50 to 60 million impressions.
In this case, the safety of pets and the protection of animals are actually a suppressed and ignored right. But now, as epidemic prevention and control has become normalized, some issues that were not taken seriously before have gradually emerged, including how to treat pets suspected of being in close contact or confirmed to have been put on the agenda and become a hot topic of discussion.
When I say this, I do not think that pet protection is unimportant. On the contrary, I think it is too late to attract attention to this issue. If this problem could have been paid attention to earlier, perhaps the three cats of the Chengdu girl could have been properly protected, and the dogs in Shangrao, Jiangxi, would not have been so rashly "harmless disposed of."
02
This incident also truly reflects the attitude of many people towards animal protection issues. On the one hand, many people have questioned the brutal culling of pets by epidemic prevention personnel; on the other hand, there are actually many people who are puzzled by the doubters. In their view, everyone must obey the overall situation of epidemic prevention, let alone pets such as cats and dogs.
This "overall view" should also be a reason why grassroots personnel in Chengdu, Shangrao and other places "kill first and then report" and cull pets without the permission of the parties involved.
"We can't care about people, let alone cats and dogs." I believe there are not a few people who still hold this kind of thinking. In fact, you can ask this question, "If you don't even value the lives of cats and dogs, how can you respect a human being?"
I say this not purely to make a point, but to reveal the fact that there is currently no basic consensus on the issue of animal protection. Not to mention, there is still a long way to go from animal protectionism to animal welfare.
There is no basic consensus on this issue. Part of it is due to socio-economic reasons. Only when people's living standards are generally improved will more people understand the importance of animal protection. The other part of the reason lies in the lack of awareness of individual rights.
Only when a person understands that respecting animal rights is actually respecting individual rights, can he truly understand the importance of animal protection.
Of course, this can also be said in reverse. If a person doesn't even value his own rights, how can he respect the rights of cats and dogs (animals)?
03
I do not deny that many people cannot bear to see cats and dogs being killed out of human nature to protect the weak, or as a natural expression of emotion.
To a certain extent, so do I. After Zhang Feng published the article "Killing Three Cats Makes Chengdu Uneasy", my reprint comment was "If it were my cat, I would fight tooth and nail."
I said this without thinking. It's very simple. Our cat (Fei Fei) has lived with us for so many years and is already a member of our family. How could we let others kill him casually?
Our family's Fei Fei was a stray cat. When we moved to the previous community, he often climbed the 9th floor stairs and came to our house to eat and drink.
I once suspected that Fei Fei had become a sperm. For example, he would first lie on his son's bed every night and accompany his son to sleep, and then around eleven o'clock, he would start yelling at me, asking me to go to bed (if I didn't sleep, he would jump on the table and make trouble, or lie down on the edge and wait for me). And in the morning, whenever he heard his son getting up, he would jump to his wife's bedside and wake her up. This goes on for years and months.
So, if someone wants to take Feifei away from us, let alone me, our whole family will definitely not agree.
I believe that many people feel the same way about their pets at home. Those epidemic prevention workers must also have cats and dogs. They will understand this simple emotion and the pain when the cats and dogs at home are culled manually.
So, although this matter involves issues such as animal protection and epidemic prevention and control, it is not that difficult to deal with. Under the legal system, it is nothing more than understanding public opinion and respecting people's sentiments.
Chengdu was able to quickly change its epidemic prevention strategy, probably because it sensed and grasped this. What Shangrao, Jiangxi and other places will do depends on the understanding of local epidemic prevention and control departments.
In particular, there is really no need to elevate this kind of thing to the level of "prevention and control" of public opinion, and there is no need to take drastic measures, such as warnings and account bans. If a place treats cats, dogs and other pets well, everyone will naturally feel the goodwill of its governance and law enforcement. This is a plus point, and should not be made into a loss point.
