They say drastic times call for drastic measures. Evidence of this was seen in Yunnan Province recently after an outbreak of rabies prompted authorities to go on a dog hunt using wooden poles and pitchforks. When they had finished, thousands of dogs lay dead.

As some sort of compensation dog owners were given up to 10 yuan per dog.

When the campaign was over, the Yunnan Daily reported Mouding County had slaughtered almost all of its pet dogs and watchdogs, totaling over 54,000, in an effort to fight against the spread of rabies. Only police and military dogs were spared.

Rabies, as I was unaware, is a massive problem in China, with the Ministry of Health reporting 2,375 deaths of the disease last year nationwide. Researchers writing in a journal published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in December said China had the world's second-highest infection rate. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that only India has more cases, with some 30,000 deaths annually.

The Shanghai Daily said 360 of Mouding County's 200,000 residents suffered dog bites this year, resulting in three deaths, one of which was a 4-year-old girl. Rabies strikes the human nervous system, generally proving fatal within a week of infection. It can, however, be counteracted by a succession of treatments.

Health experts say some of the blame for the increase of rabies cases is due to the escalation in dog ownership, predominantly in rural areas, where almost 70 percent of households keep dogs. According to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, only about 3 percent of Chinese dogs are vaccinated against rabies, as it isn't easy to get treatment in the countryside.

Speaking to USA Today, Dr. Francette Dusan, a WHO expert on diseases passed from animals to people, said effective rabies control requires coordinated efforts between human and animal health agencies and authorities.

"This has not been pursued adequately to date in China with most control efforts consisting of purely reactive dog culls," Dusan said.

Predictably, the culling received massive attention on the Internet, with both legal scholars and animal rights activists criticizing it as crude and cold-blooded.

Criticism even came from local media. "Wiping out the dogs shows these government officials didn't do their jobs right in protecting people from rabies in the first place," Legal Daily, a newspaper run by the Committee of Political and Legislative Affairs of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, said in an editorial in its online edition.

And why were the drastic measures taken in the first place? "With the aim to keep this horrible disease from people, we decided to kill the dogs," Li Haibo, spokesman for the Mouding County Government, told official Xinhua News Agency.

But speaking to Beijing Today, Li Huiping of the Beijing Pets Protection Association said she was shocked by the killings, adding that there was something wrong with the animal control procedures in Mouding, and that it was the local government's fault and not the dogs'. She did concede that the big number of stray dogs was a problem.

If looked at realistically, the officials who gave the instructions to slaughter the dogs obviously did so with the interests of the people in mind. They were trying to prevent further loss of human life. That's understandable.

What doesn't jive is the way in which this was done. A focus of China's 11th Five-Year Plan for National Social and Economic Development (2006-10) is building a harmonious countryside. How on earth can this be done when people's pets are being bludgeoned to death in front of them, while they're out for a walk? There are obviously more compassionate ways of killing dogs than this, including lethal injection. Is the county that poor that is has to traumatize its residents to avoid the cost of something more humane? These were not stray dogs, they were pets, and pets become part of one's family. Officials need to realize that there are consequences to their actions, which need to be thought through more carefully. What is good for the community isn't only preventing infection; it's also about mental well-being. In the quest for harmony, let's not forget the animal kingdom.

The author is a South African living in Beijing.