The Politics of Breeding: Rabies Prevention and the Shaping of Human-Dog Relations in Modern Japan.

Abstract

Rabies prevention has become a vital part of public health administration owing to the high incidence of rabies in Japan in modern times. The rabies prevention system in Japan, which was gradually established based on the rabies knowledge and prevention policies from Europe and the United States, was centered on livestock dog control, wild dog culling, and vaccination. This epidemic prevention system was based on two premises. First, though rabies is a zoonotic infectious disease, the focus of epidemic prevention administration was to protect humans, not dogs. Second, this system attempted to eliminate the rabies hazard at its source by reducing the number of all dogs-livestock dogs included. Under this epidemic prevention mechanism, the survival space of dogs as an object of public health administration was significantly eroded. In contrast, during wartime, the Japanese Empire encouraged people to donate their dogs to the military so their fur could be used to make military coats, and in the name of existing rabies prevention programs, extended the target of culling from wild dogs only to all non-military dogs. This administrative model of epidemic prevention, which attempted to hide the violence and arbitrariness of dog killing by creating artificial distinctions among dogs, is a metaphor for the power training mechanism in modern society.