If you are a resident of Beijing, this is a hot legal issue. If you live anywhere else, you probably don’t care unless you are a dog lover.

The Beijing government has been very aggressive in enforcing a wide variety of dog licensing requirements and restrictions in recent months, and they have even gone so far as to go door-to-door in some neighborhoods looking for oversized or unlicensed canines.

This has incensed local dog owners, both Chinese nationals and foreigners, with some of the latter group considering skipping town and going to places that are more dog friendly.

There have actually been public protests over this issue, which says a lot about the depth of feeling of dog owners. I am not surprised and believe that Beijing has miscalculated how strongly people here feel about their pets.

Beijing fired back in the PR wars over this recently by taking journalists on a tour of a suburban dog holding facility. The visitors were apparently satisfied with the conditions, but the underlying tension remains. I am a cat owner, but I don’t like the idea of the cops knocking on my door looking for an unlicensed pooch. Moreover, there have been huge problems with the bureaucratic process with this crackdown. Some people have had their dogs taken away and destroyed (i.e. killed) before being given an adequate opportunity to pay the fine.

I had originally heard that the most recent crackdown was instigated because of rabies. Now we hear that it is because of a surge in canine assaults on people, generally the old dog-bites-man story. Officials say that reported cases of dog bites are up 22% in the first 11 months of this year. However, 70% of those dog bites involved dog owners or their family members. I’m not really sure what the real justification is, therefore, or whether it makes any sense.

Update on the update: Shanghaiist has a lot more detail on this, including rumors in the press that this might all be over soon.