BEIJING AND CHINA'S CANINE RESTRICTIONS!

A Beijing law making it illegal to keep dogs taller than 35centimetres (1.1 foot) means that dogs such as placid Golden Retriever are outlaws and can be locked up and put down if they are intercepted by the authorities in the Olympic

Pet ownership in China is booming and dog lovers in particular complain about Beijing’s inflexible laws against large dogs which they say harks back to China’s communist past when few people kept dogs as pets, and those that did were scorned as bourgeois time wasters by communist leader Mao Zedong.

As pets become popular in China, Beijing dog owners are bristling over the city ban on large dogs and hefty annual license fees for small dogs of as much as 1,000 Yuan ($146).

Beijing’s 17 million residents registered 703,897 pet dogs in 2007, up 17.3 percent from 600,096 in 2006. The number is probably much higher after factoring in unregistered dogs.

Foreign diplomats are exempt from the size rule, and are often spotted parading huge Golden Retrievers, Siberian Huskies and Labradors along leafy streets.