Over the past few days, netizens across Guangzhou have been reflecting on social media platforms that their pet dogs have been poisoned and killed. A dog owner in Guangzhou’s Liwan District told China News Weekly that two of her pet dogs were poisoned on the night of November 8th. According to her understanding, at least six dogs were poisoned in her dog-walking area during the same time period. As of Nov. 20, more than 40 pet dogs in Guangzhou have died of suspected poisoning.
——中国新闻周刊
Incidents of poisoning of pets would be of particular concern to me, not only because I own dogs, but also because of the inexplicable worry that comes with having a dog and then having oxytocin raised.More importantly, there are too many “hidden messages” behind this incident.That’s why I used a sentence like the title:
When people “poison” themselves, what are they “poisoning” themselves with? This “poison” can be replaced by various kinds of personal injuries.
Why did you poison the dog?
In mainland Chinese criminal law, crimes are considered to be composed of four elements: the subject of the crime, the object of the crime, the subjectivity of the crime and the objectivity of the crime. The law on poisoning pets and stray animals in public places has always been ambiguous, especially when the poison is not prohibited and does not cause physical harm to the human body, the act of poisoning does not trigger a crime. Pets can be protected as “private property”, but stray animals themselves are not protected by existing laws and regulations.
It’s interesting that if you search for the phrase “poisoning dogs”, you can see polarized comments at the bottom of various stories.There are those who think that legislation should be improved as soon as possible to protect pets, and there are also those who think that pet dogs should be driven to extinction. Protecting dogs and killing dogs have always been extreme symbiotic events, especially when people do not need to be responsible for their own words, the phrase “kill all the dogs” does satisfy the desire to speak out.
Some people who hate dogs will have psychological factors resulting from the original historical reasons.This fear and dread is on a physiological level, and coupled with the news coverage of dog injuries, this fear can be exacerbated by biased information.
Other people who hate dogs are perhaps the result of acquired factors. such as pet nuisance, disparity between rich and poor, social class gap, loss of dignity, and so on.The dog becomes a symbol that stimulates a certain emotional response in the person, leading to a misperception and triggering a corresponding behavior.
The dog as a “vulnerable” symbol, the abuse of it can be “safe” to meet the sense of dignity, but also fully embodies their own overriding pleasure in life – just because the group of people enough “cowardice”, so they have to choose this way to meet their humble and fragile dignity. It is only because these people are “weak” enough that they have no choice but to choose this way to satisfy their humble and fragile dignity.At the same time, this group of people is very easy to be incited, for example, “people who keep Japanese Shiba Inu are unpatriotic”, and they are very likely to pick up a U-lock and slam it on the owner of the Shiba Inu.
Therefore, in order to find out “why”, we need to find out whether the person concerned has a specific fear of “dogs” or an aversion to symbols. Therefore, the object of the crime is complicated by the poisoning itself.
Understanding dog poisoning from the perspective of the offender’s mindset
Substituting, if you were a poisoner targeting animals, what would you want to happen as a result? Of course, you would want pets to die one after another, so as to show the perpetrator’s“Existential.”. In order to cause more deaths, the way of poisoning and the area of poisoning become the most important influencing factors.
Since the object of the crime is “animals”, it is necessary to study thoroughly when and in what way the animals go out. All neighborhood poisoning, pet dog gathering place is the best place to put area. For example, in the mass poisoning of dogs in Guangzhou, the poisoning site is on the lawn where pet dogs often gather.
For the object of the crime of “dog”, the poisoner needs to observe the habits of the dog to know which paths are chosen by the majority of people walking their dogs; or the owner of a large dog will be fixed in a certain area of the neighborhood every night, resulting in large dogs barking and disturbing the public. At this time, the poisoning of the “subjective” because the target is the dog, they will try to avoid contact with the dog owner, because the crime has been completed when the dog was poisoned.
But for the “dog owner” as the object of the crime, the poisoner is a personal and even symbolic understanding, such as this person often out of not much place. But here is a more awkward point, some rich people live in high-end neighborhoods itself has a strict access control system, these people because of hatred of the rich and want to abuse the rich people’s pets, simply can not even enter the neighborhood door. Another special case is the poisoning at dog events, where the perpetrator is targeting a group symbol for poisoning.
So it stands to reason that they themselves could have poisoned anywhere, especially in a location frequented by dogs. At this point we need to introduce another “rule” to understand the “cost” of the crime.
How do you assess the level of danger of poisoning?
Poisoning doesn’t count.“Black Swan”, which itself, because of its regularity, can be used to assess the level of danger horizontally and vertically through the following elements.
- Episodic vs. frequent
- (b) Episodic incidents are not “universal” per se, so there is no need to be anxious about them. Occasional incidents can be caused by accidental pet food, pesticide poisoning, etc. that are not “subjective and intentional”;
- Frequent events need to be analyzed for all possibilities, such as environmental contamination, persistent residual poisons from extermination efforts against plants or insects, and frequent events can be blocked once there is human intervention. For example, if the owner stays away from the area, or if the source of contamination is artificially removed, the risk is low if there are no subsequent events;
- Individuality vs. group
- Similar to episodic events, individual events need to be analyzed for the true cause of the pet poisoning, otherwise it cannot be reversed to determine that an actual poisoning event has occurred in the area. In the case of an individual incident, the area needs to be continuously observed, and if the episodic incident becomes a frequent one, it can be recognized as a mass incident;
- The most serious group incidents, especially those occurring in a short period of time, i.e. group + sporadic incidents, can be recognized as “poisoning incidents”.Such events, if they persist, would require a reassessment of the presence of persistent sources of pollution in the area;
Therefore, there is no need to panic when a “poisoning” incident occurs. Owners can intervene by changing dog walking paths or wearing muzzles for their pets for continuous observation. Once an incident results in a sustained mass casualty or becomes a recurring event, the possibility of “poisoning” needs to be considered.
Don’t ignore the “distractions” in the poisoning.
The so-called “disruptive events” are events that cause the above ratings to become “serious”, but have nothing to do with poisoning. Such events are in themselves a “human game”.
One type of disruptive event is when an owner accidentally or intentionally causes injury or death to a pet and then, in order to minimize guilt, disguises the individual incidental event as “poisoning” and shifts the blame from themselves to a non-existent “third party culprit”.When the lie has been told a thousand times, he himself will take the lie seriously and think that his dog was poisoned to death.
Another type of disruptive event requires a “brainwave”. A person is afraid that his dog will be poisoned, so he first poisoned the neighborhood, causing other people’s pets to be poisoned, so that he feels that the event has already occurred, and that his dog can be protected from the possibility of being poisoned. This incident seems to be very “abstract”, but in fact, it is the same gambler’s fallacy as the gamblers who think that “there has not been a six in seven rounds, so there will definitely be a six in the next round”. At the same time.These people, because of alternative defense mechanisms, transfer their fear of an event to others by creating or contributing to the event in order to relieve their anxiety.
So as long as the event you fear the most happens, then the event will not happen to you.
Once these two types of disruptive events enter the data, they elevate the severity of the poisoning incident, thus creating more fear and anxiety.
Okay, now you can replace “poisoning” with any group event to better understand the underlying logic of the story.
For example, replace “doxing” with “cyberstorming” – what are people cyberstorming when they are cyberstorming?