One Baby... One Dog... One Beerrrr....

Now onto non-gay news items...

From the People's Republic of China, where the state knows what's best for you and social planning never comes with unintended consequences (ahem), this article from state news agency Xinhua reveals a directive that all Chinese households are restricted to one dog. Since parents are only allowed to have one child, the prevailing state wisdom must have determined that it would be decadent for them to frolic with more than one pet.

The Chinese government showed its usual restraint in dealing with the situation:

In one county in the southwestern province of Yunnan, where three people had died of rabies, authorities killed 50,000 dogs, many of them beaten to death in front of their owners.

...

Following the communist seizure of power in 1949, dog ownership was condemned as a bourgeois affectation and canines were hunted as pests. Attitudes have softened in recent years, although urban Chinese are still subject to strict rules on the size of their pets and must pay steep registration fees.

318 people died of rabies in China last September, tragic in itself but hardly the number one killer in a nation of over 1 billion... at least 10 times that amount were executed by the state last year. Pick your poison, I guess.


China issues 'one dog' policy in Beijing [Yahoo! News]