Hong Kong’s pooch-pampering ways keep a lid on ‘devil dog’ menace
The city's pampered canines rarely attack, but the rising popularity of an aggressive training technique has raised alarm bells with animal experts
'Devil dog' attacks are rare in a city where canine lovers have pampered the inner wolf out of their pets, but experts have expressed alarm at owners trying dominance training techniques.
Despite the cramped, sweltering conditions in which most of the city's pet dogs - never mind the strays - are kept and the fact that dog training in the SAR is rudimentary at best, dog attacks are rare.
''The city doesn’t really have a problem with dangerous domestic dogs but over pampering is still a big issue here,” said Karina O’Connell from the charity Animals Asia, describing how overfeeding dogs and giving them no guidance or training can mean dogs might run amok and misbehave, though they are unlikely to attack people.
“Problems arise with dogs when owners try to do dominance training on their dogs,” O’Connell said, adding that there were concerns that unleashing Schutzhund, the style of training propagated by Felix Ho Fei-yin which is used to test the skills of supreme working dogs.
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Thirty-eight per cent of households have dogs, making dogs the most common pets in Hong Kong, according to a census study from 2006.
In 2006, 197,700 dogs were recorded in households across Hong Kong. The number of local canines is likely to be far higher, given that many go unrecorded and count as “semi-stray”, being fed and cared for but not registered.