A grinning man clad in army fatigues brandishes a rifle, a dead boar lies at his feet. He wears a helmet and an ammunition belt stuffed with gun cartridges. His image, plastered all over Beijing's subway, is the face of a new hunting reserve, a half-day's drive from the capital. East International Hunting Place, which allows guests to shoot deer, wild boar, foxes, pheasants and endangered leopards, sprawls over a so-called protected primeval forest near Taiyue Mountain in Shanxi province . 'You will find boundless joy in hunting here,' the reserve's website boasts. While the park's investors are hoping hunting will become the new golf, a media backlash against the advert may be one of the first signs that mainlanders are slowly gaining a passion for animal welfare. 'It's disgusting,' the Beijing Morning Post quoted one commuter as saying. Another asked: 'What age are we in? Time is running out for the world to save wild animals and then to put such a poster in the subway advertising the killing of animals for entertainment.' Cao Jieming, an activist and former editor-in-chief of the magazine Greenness, pointed out the irony of setting up a hunting park for the rich to chase animals with dogs, while the country's wildlife was threatened by urbanisation and population pressures. 'Many of China's environmental protection laws exist only on paper; they are never put into practice,' Mr Cao said. 'So now we have the absurd situation where in a country which has national-level legislation on animal protection you have a hunting park advertised in the subway. Don't you think it's very bold and ... outrageous?' The media tongue-lashing against East Hunt is not an isolated case. On Christmas Day, the press was again up in arms after 16 puppies, baby rabbits and hamsters were crushed to death in Beijing as police arrested a couple for illegally hawking the pets. The traders and police accuse each other of killing the animals. A few days later, the public was shocked again when a zoo in Hebei province was ordered to close after one of its rare Siberian tigers was found beheaded and skinned. This media outrage is seen by some animal welfare officials as an encouraging sign that the public is getting behind the idea of protecting wildlife. 'The media is starting to challenge such things [as the hunting reserve],' said Jeff He, communications manager at the Beijing office of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. He said the violent tone of the advert really offended some people. It advertised 'genuine guns and real bullets ... so it's not only about animal welfare, it's also about people's security and this [ad] totally goes against President Hu Jintao's message of a harmonious society. It's the most inharmonious thing ever.' According to some wildlife experts, almost 40 per cent of mammal species in China are endangered, with Tibetan antelope, wild yak, sheep, wolves and tigers topping the list of threatened animals. Last year a similar public outcry resulted in the State Forestry Administration, which oversees wildlife protection, abandoning a plan to auction off licences to hunt wild animals, some of them endangered. The hunting licences give the owner the right to kill certain species from a list of more than 200 animals, including many endangered in the remote western provinces and regions of Qinghai, Shaanxi , Gansu , Ningxia and Xinjiang. This is an edited version of an article which appeared in the South China Morning Post on January 7. Viewpoint 'As Chinese society becomes more open, we have more exposure to these ideas through books, movies, documentaries. All this is making a better environment to get people interested in animal welfare' Lu Di, a professor in communications at Tsinghua University 'At the psychological level, Chinese people are ready to embrace an animal welfare law nationwide' Jeff He, communications manager at the Beijing office of the International Fund for Animal Welfare 'People's quality of life is rising and they have time to think about how we treat animals' Zhang Ling of the China Wildlife Conservation Association
