Beggars put last straw on camel's back

Beggars are using emaciated camels in Foshan, Guangdong province, to exploit people's compassion to get alms, a person recently wrote in his micro blog. Such scenes, however, are not restricted to Foshan, for since early this year beggars have been using ill-fed camels in several major cities, including Guangzhou and Shenzhen in Guangdong province and Xiamen in Fujian province, to seek alms.

Photographs of such camels, forced to kneel down by their "owner" beggars in an attempt to trigger people's sympathy, have drawn widespread condemnation, especially from netizens.

Many people have even asked whether the beggars deliberately ill-treated the camels or chopped their hooves off to make them look more miserable and thus earn more money. Even if the beggars have not done so, the fact that they are forcing the camels to kneel down on the hard road surface for long hours and not feeding them properly are enough to cause great physical harm to the animals.

Recent years have witnessed more organized begging activities. For example, some organized gangs have forced kidnapped or physically challenged children to beg on the streets and thus violated the law. Beggars are using many other new means to get alms, lending a professional touch to what used to be the last resort of poor people to feed themselves. As a result, an increasing number of people have become wary of beggars so much so that they even doubt the conditions of even the genuinely needy.

Also, the "inventive" means used by beggars to seek alms have scarred cityscapes and sullied the public environment.

Although beggars started using camels to seek alms several years ago, local authorities have still not taken effective measures to stop the practice. Perhaps the lack of proper regulations against cruelty to animals, both domestic and wild, is to blame for that. For example, if the "beggar camels" are domestic, and thus not under the protection of the existing law, local forestry departments cannot take measures such as temporary seizure to stop such practice.

The authorities, therefore, should realize that only strict supervision and punishment, as opposed to leniency, could end the horrible practice of animal abuse. One after another case of cruelty to animals has been highlighted in the recent past thanks to power of the Internet. But it is not enough to condemn such misbehavior only at the moral level. The only animal-related law in China is the Law on the Protection of Wildlife issued in 2004, and it does not include the protection of animals such as cats, dogs and other domestic animals, although many countries have had such laws in place for years. It is time, therefore, for the legislature to enact an all-comprehensive and effective law against animal abuse.

The author is a writer with China Daily. xiaolixin@chinadaily.com.cn