China’s ‘two sessions’ 2023: lawmaker calls for legal protections for pets
- The proposal by a deputy to the National People’s Congress would close a long-standing loophole in animal cruelty laws
- Growing numbers of Chinese people are keeping pets, but there are no laws in place to protect them
A Chinese parliamentary deputy has called for legislation to ban the mistreatment of pets – a move that would address a long-standing legal loophole.
“The number of pets and scale of the industry has reached a high level in the country, but miseries like animal torture have been frequently exposed online,” Tang Lijun, a Sichuan-based veterinary surgeon and a delegate to the National People’s Congress, told local news site Thecover.cn on Tuesday.
Tang suggested a pet protection law which includes regulations on registration, vaccination and abandonment. The legislation should also penalise pet abuse and consider imprisonment in serious cases, he said.
China has laws to regulate and protect livestock, animals used in laboratories and some wild species, but there is no general law on animal cruelty or protections for pets and stray cats and dogs.
More than 116 million cats and dogs are owned by people in cities, according to a white paper released by the China Pet Industry Association in 2022.
In recent years, viral videos that show cats and dogs being killed have raised public awareness of the issue but it is hard to act against animal abusers.
When multiple Chinese cities imposed Covid lockdowns during the past three years, some government workers prompted a huge public backlash by killing the pets of people who had been quarantined.
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Without specific laws on pets, “abuse of your own pets or stray pets are not considered criminal offences”, Yao Zhidou, a lawyer in Beijing, told China National Radio.
But if you abuse someone else’s pets, the action could be considered property damage, and you could be sued, he added.
An article about the sale of animal abuse videos swept the internet in China in 2021, and said that people who paid the filmmaker could decide on how a cat would be killed, for example by electric shock, fire or boiling water.
Although people who post the videos online could be prosecuted under the catch-all charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, if the videos were viewed privately, there was nothing that could be done, Wang Mingzhi, another Beijing lawyer said.
In China, “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” carries a maximum penalty of five years in jail.
Tang also pointed to limitations on the growth of the 270 billion yuan (US$38.8 billion) industry, as disputes often occur over services like grooming, fostering and veterinary care.
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“The policy on raising and breeding pets in China lacks standards, regulation, and transparency, causing animal breeds, numbers and quality to get out of control,” Tang said.
A pet protection law would help develop a sound and rule-based industry, making sure the market for pets could grow in an orderly way, he added.
