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Let Us Now Kill All The Dogs
China slaughters tens of thousands of canines with giant clubs. How appalling is it?

Chinese officials killed 50,000 dogs the other day. Just walked along the streets and lured them out of their homes and bushes and doghouses using whistles and firecrackers and then clubbed them to death with giant sticks, right there in the residential streets, tossed the bodies into big dump trucks and drove on.

It was a particularly horrific scene, seemingly unimaginable in our "enlightened" age, a fully sanctioned slaughter ordered up by the local Chinese government in response to the recent deaths of three local people felled by rabies. Without some sort of action, more people could die, the government deduced. Solution: Kill all the dogs. Problem solved, right? Well, not quite.

There is nowhere to look for the right answer. How do you process this? How can you file such an unspeakably brutal and seemingly heartless approach? Maybe you are shaking your head in disbelief. Maybe you can't process it at all, but you must admit, it brings a up number of powerful -- and deeply revealing -- notions of just who we think we are.

But wait. Is America really that much more evolved? Do we not kill millions of ill-bred, hormone-injected, mistreated animals every single day in giant industrial slaughterhouses to feed our gluttonous and largely toxic fast-food cravings? You bet we do.

You have to ask: Are we much better at our treatment of animals simply because we've learned to hide it better? Because most of us will never come anywhere near one of those gruesome industrial feedlots in, say, rural Kansas or Oklahoma, where they cram tens of thousands of cattle into concrete-enclosed pens and the air is so thick with fetid gasses and feces and smokestack spewings you can smell the stench 100 miles away?