Voices

Bins, education will clean capital

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-10 11:28

Education on recycling needed

Dear copy editor, if I may add to what you have already said and said quite well, if I may say so. People are where the garbage issues start and it will always be that way outside of an industrial setting.

Placing more than one garbage container on the streets is a good start. Beside the one for waste, there should be one for recyclable plastics and glass. Give people an idea of what to place in which container. It's a simple start to recycling, but it will grow as more people are made aware of how they should be throwing garbage away.

Fines are good, but only to a certain point and then they become ineffective, because people will find a way to beat those fines. Use education instead, starting in the schools with children. You would be amazed at what a child can teach a parent.

Public schools and private schools have a lot of students who will take the message home to their parents.

Others will need to be shown. Try a public service advertisement in a newspaper to show people how to recycle and use television to do the same. It's like any kind of training, the more you see it and hear it, the more it becomes a habit.

ILoveChina

Joint effort to clean up

I have been Beijing for so many years that I also have witnessed a change of attitude in the public. I hope the city's environmental condition will be persistently improved through the joint effort of all the citizens in the future.

John

ON TRUMPET AN END TO IVORY TRADE

Some traditions ridiculous

The fact that people pursue the purchase and exchange of gifts such as ivory, based solely on the fact that two words sound similar is, in this modern day, completely ridiculous.

Traditions aside, we as a people are now (hopefully) more educated than ever before. To support a barbaric trade such as the killing of elephants for tusks (and other animals such as tigers for their bones and rhinoceros for their horns) is an embarrassment to modern-day society. Thank you for writing this column.

Beijing-blue

Ivory trade barbaric

Thank you for writing this column. Elephants are intelligent, sentient beings that are dying so that humans can own a carved tusk. Please stop this murder.

The cartoon, however, is completely inaccurate. The elephants are killed and their faces are hacked off, leaving the entire body behind, with grieving babies waiting by their mothers' bodies until they die. It is a horrible crime.

Angela

ON ROAST DOG CAN BE SOME HUMANS' BEST FRIEND

Don't eat dogs

The proposed ban, if approved, will be a good move, in the direction of a more advanced culture. Eating dogs is a tradition of times of hunger and low quality of life.

Dogs are some of the most humanized mammals and they are correspondingly respected and loved by most people, particularly children.

In the past we also ate other people, but as society modernized that became unacceptable. The same is true for incest - in the past it was common but today it is rightly regarded as a monstrosity. Why criticize the highly civilized proposal to ban eating humans' best friend? Dogs are not simple pets like golden fishes or rabbits. Dogs are faithful to you until death and they are capable of rescuing humans. Leonardo da Vinci was, according to some people, an animal lover to the extent that he was a vegetarian. We should follow his example.

ON SHOULD YOU PAMPER YOUR POOCH OR EAT IT?

Dogs are humans' friends

Probably some Asian people will oppose the proposed ban only because Westerners consider eating dogs barbaric.

But the relation of dogs with humans transcends the superficial cultural differences between the East and the West.

Dogs are among the most intellectually developed mammals. They are the most humanized and can have close relationship with humans.

Just consider the help dogs provide to the visually impaired. They also are absolutely faithful to humans and often become their inseparable companions. No other animals can do the same.

San Rocco

Treat dogs humanely

A ban on serving dog meat in China sounds silly to me although I love pets, especially dogs. If this is China's tradition, we should all learn to show some respect. But some footage I have seen on the Internet that shows dogs being tortured and beaten to death just because some cold-hearted traders want to make money from dog meat gives me chills. The authorities can do more to stop violence against poor dogs that are treated badly.

Burak

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