IN Beijing, there are so many people and so many cars, the authorities contact people by text or e-mail to advise them about the particular days when they will be allowed to drive their cars in the city.
This is the same city where one is allowed to own just one dog and that must weigh 20kg or less, and the same country where one is allowed only one child. I didn’t ask what happens if one has twins or what happened to all the larger dogs when the city ordinance came through but it is entirely understandable that some things have to be more regimented if you live in a city of more than 23 million souls as the capital of a country with 1.4 billion people.
If that were not astounding enough for anyone to wrap their mind around, this is around a quarter of the world’s total population of about 6.5million people.
In the UK, around half the households own a pet which means that, if we expect China to develop western tastes and to follow suit, we might expect there to be 230 million dogs in China by the time a comparable middle-class affluence were to be the norm.
Imagine just how much dog food that would take, let alone how much dog faeces there would be! Of course, it will take some time for a comparable level of affluence to develop but the forecasters say that by 2020, there will be already 500 million new middle-class consumers in China, all eager to buy Western goods, so maybe it won’t take that long.
Their immediate neighbours in Hong Kong are certainly aware of this meteoric rise in affluence and spending power and, in a recent article in the South China News, the following figures were quoted: in the US, today, around 5 billion chickens are consumed each year but by 2020, China will be consuming 120 billion chickens a year.
Where will all that poultry be raised, on what will it be fed and what intensive farming methods will be needed to maintain a healthy and
sustainable supply of protein on this scale?
The current Chinese philosophy is that one eats rice when one is poor but one certainly doesn’t want rice when one can afford something better and nothing gives the faintest indication that things will be different when the economy really takes off.
Indeed, the Chinese government is doing whatever it can to drive this lifestyle as the middle-class population burgeons, encouraging more consumer power and the transfer from low-end manufacturing towards the production of high-end goods.
High-end job creation
The government wants more sustainable growth and is focusing on high-end job creation in the consumer sector. It is little wonder that the Chinese are walking the tightrope between political control and driving consumer demand as they have an enormous population of university leavers for whom jobs must be found if the nation is to avoid the unrest that has beset other totalitarian states around the world.
Chinese cities are tiered by size and importance with Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou being tier 1, secondary provincial capitals tier 2 and prefectures or county level city capitals being tier 3. In the shops in tiers 2 and 3, there is very little choice of things to buy and erratic supply but in tier 1 cities, there are already long queues forming where wealthy consumers are clamouring for western goods, eager and ready to embrace the fashion world and the endless range of must-have gadgets.
Of course, even with stringent attention to population control, the current population figures will continue to show compound growth for decades to come.
In Beijing, one of the badges of demonstrable wealth is a new car and, in 2010, China bought more new cars than in the whole of North America.
Another obvious way to display new-found affluence is to have a pet dog or cat and the Chinese interest in pedigree dogs and cats is growing exponentially – the more exotic the breeds the better – and while diseases like FIP are already a significant problem, we can only imagine that we’ve not seen anything yet.
The world will be a very different place within a decade as similar patterns of massive growth in populations and concomitant affluence in developing countries such as China, Russia, Brazil, Turkey and India come to affect the dynamics of world trade and the distribution of resources, food and utilities such as power, gas and water.
Within the veterinary arena, we are unlikely to see major indigenous population growth in the UK or elsewhere in Western Europe and, without the contrived immigration of young, fertile, hardworking families from outside Western Europe, our indulgent social policies like free healthcare and the autumn care of a growing elderly population will be unsustainable if left to a disproportionately smaller population of younger indigenous people.
This may challenge the normal stereotypes for pet ownership and the types of pet which this changing population would choose.
We should imagine that, like China, we’d be choosing smaller dogs but for different reasons and that, with cities continuing to grow and a probable swing towards non-Christian faiths, we may see an acceleration in the popularity of cats and, in particular, more pedigree cats.
If we had a crystal ball, we could imagine that we would see far less reliance on the long-distance transport of all goods and in particular foodstuffs, accompanied by a resultant development of interest in and reliance on home-grown and home-reared foods, quite contrary to current trends.
As veterinarians, we might expect to see more cats, fewer dogs, far more hobby food animals such as chickens, sheep and pigs and a rapid development in the techniques of intensive rearing for food animals with a high protein yield.
At least, that’s what we’re expecting to see all over the world and in particular in the developing countries, so it might be reasonable to expect that here too. Might it not, also, be reasonable to expect veterinary students in 2020 to need all that knowledge about multiple species and about the economics of food production? Perhaps this will be the time when what was once called omnicompetence (before the politically correct got at it) might once again be something to be valued and widely utilised.
The other area where the more developed West will have the advantage will be in the field of disease control in large populations of production animals and while none of us doubts that our friends in China will soon learn for themselves, there will almost certainly be a major role to play in exporting expertise in the containment of disease within species and the inevitable zoonoses.
While the future is bright, it will most certainly be different.
