A city in China ordered all indoor pets in one neighborhood to be killed if their owners had COVID-19.
The state-run China News Service reported on Wednesday that the Anci District of Langfang city ordered the “complete culling of indoor animals” belonging to COVID-19 patients, according to Insider.
“In order to ensure the safety of positive patients returning home, after communicating with the Langfang City Center for Disease Control and Prevention, it is necessary to comprehensively and thoroughly kill the animals domesticated by positive patients as soon as possible,” the order read, as reported by Fortune.
The killing stopped Wednesday evening following pushback from citizens, a Langfang Center for Disease Control and Prevention staff member said. It is unclear how many pets were slain.
As of last week, an estimated 50 million people in China have been placed in lockdown throughout the country due to the latest wave of COVID-19.
Ji Xiaolong, a resident of Yanlord Garden in Pudong New District, said his residential compound has been locked down for the past four days.
“The iron gates are locked and blocked with metal guardrails, and the iron sheets have been welded together,” Ji told Radio Free Asia. “Nobody in the compound, which is two or three thousand people, is able to leave.”
“We have been locked down for four days,” he said. “There are foreigners who want to get out, but they can’t.”
China has strived for zero COVID since the beginning of the pandemic and officials in the communist regime have been deleting online content questioning the Chinese Communist Party’s COVID-19 policy.
Among the content deleted was financial blogger Liu Haiying’s post criticizing the economic impact of the CCP’s policy.
“Almost 100 percent of the economic cost of fighting the epidemic is borne by the private sector,” Liu’s post stated. “Countless families and tens of millions of small and micro enterprises have countless stories of sweat and tears, but there is no place to publish them.”
“It’s impossible for China to maintain zero-COVID because it needs to have dealings with other countries,” he added.
Late last year, NPR reported that a dog owner in China witnessed on her home security camera Chinese health workers beat her pet corgi to death with iron rods while she was quarantined in a state facility.
“The dog ran into another room and out of sight, but its whimpers were audible,” the woman said. “After a few minutes, the workers took out yellow plastic bags and said they were taking the dog away.”
