from: http://network.bestfriends.org/international/news/9191.html

Best Friends has been receiving emails from many individuals in Beijing and throughout China asking for help in stopping the campaign of seizing dogs. These calls for help state that private homes are being entered, and that people’s dogs are being removed, taken away and presumably being killed. Street dogs are also being rounded up.

In Beijing people are permitted to own one small dog. Small is defined as less than 35 cm (14”). The dog must be licensed.

City officials have begun entering people’s homes and confiscating all “illegal” dogs, that is those that are unlicensed, or larger than 14 inches or the “extra” dogs in homes with more than one dog.

Also being picked up by city agents are street dogs who are over 35 cm in height. Based on prior round-ups of dogs in Chinese cities, including recent round-ups in which dogs were killed with extreme brutality, it is widely believed that the dogs rounded up in Beijing are being killed, both the street dogs and the “owned” dogs.

It is estimated that there are approximately one million dogs in Beijing. Having dogs as companions has become popular in recent years among Chinese people, especially city-dwellers.

A mass killing of street dogs took place prior to the Olympics in Athens, and it is believed likely that this dog culling in Beijing has as its purpose the “cleaning up” of the city before the 2008 Olympics.