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It's dogs' life!
(Asian Times)
Updated: 2006-02-01 11:58 Across the mainland, a wide array of pet-care products and services are
mushrooming, including specialist pet clothing stores, dentists, traditional
Chinese medicines developed specially for pets and pet burial services. However,
given that these come with a weighty price tag, Euromonitor's research revealed
that pet food remains the primary purchase of most pet owners. When packaged dog
food first made an appearance in Chinese supermarkets in the early 1990s, many
people were not quite clear on what it was, with some consumers reportedly
purchasing it to eat themselves, mistaking it for canned dog meat.
Chinese dogs have until recently had a rather unhappy lot in life. Throughout
the heyday of communism from the 1950s to the late 1970s, regular
dog-extermination programs were carried out on the mainland. Canines were seen
as a threat to public hygiene and were routinely executed by mobs. Even the new
China of glittering malls and Starbucks coffee shops hasn't completely rid
itself of such tendencies. During the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome)
epidemic of mid-2003, for example, unfounded fears that dogs might be carriers
of the virus led to hundreds of animals being rounded up off the streets and put
to death.
Li Huan Lan, 47, recalled, eyes wide with terror, how during the SARS scare
she had to keep her beloved Pekinese Bao Ber indoors at all times, fearing that
were he to be caught outside, she would be forced to give him up. "I used to let
him out for just a few minutes so he could go to the bathroom, and sometimes
even if he hadn't had time to do his business, I had to rush him back into the
house," she said.
Attitudes to dogs are further complicated by their traditional role as a
warming food, ostensibly beneficial to circulation and perfect for the cold
winter months. Juliana Liu, a journalist with Reuters in Beijing, looked back 15
years and remembered how her childhood pet dog mysteriously disappeared, only to
reappear later as dinner. The dog had been given to the family as a present and
was considered too expensive to maintain. Eating it was just more practical.
There are still more than 100 restaurants in Beijing that serve dog meat, but
three-quarters of the city's more than 460,000 registered pooches now happily
feed on packaged dog foods. According to Euromonitor, US-based pet-food giant
Mars dominates the dog- and cat-food market in the mainland, with its popular
brands Whiskas and Pedigree accounting for 58% of retail sales in 2004.
Recently, domestic producers have been making efforts to boost their product
quality and are now vying for sales opportunities in the medium price segment,
but because of low brand awareness continue to cater mainly to the low end of
the market.
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