Changsha police respond after killing dog with stick

Changsha police claimed on December 31 that they used a stick to beat a dog to death after reports it hurt people since they didn't have access to an anaesthetic rifle at the time.

A netizen said in a Weibo post on the afternoon of December 31 that “a golden retriever was tortured to death by police for a couple of hours” on Furong Road. The post soon went viral, with people shocked at the cruelty of the incident.

As a video posted by a netizen showed, a dog bolted to a block of stone was covered in blood as police bashed it to death with a stick. 

Police said they received a report around 3pm that someone was bitten by a dog near the city’s Furong Road. They found a 66-year-old man, surnamed Leng, had a knee injury and a 23-year-old man, surnamed Zhu, was also attacked and his clothes were torn.

Police were unable to find the dog's owner and were not equipped with an anaesthetic rifle at the time, so they proceeded to beat the dog with a stick to prevent it from hurting others. They said they didn't want to shoot the dog considering the bullet might bounce and injure others. 

Netizens questioned how a chained-up dog could bite people and asked police to release the surveillance video from the site.