Military dogs rated as special combatants

File photo: a military dog gets training with two soldiers together.

With the approval of the four general headquarters/departments of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA), Regulations of the PLA on the Work of Military Dogs (hereinafter abbreviated as "the Regulations") was officially issued and put into force a few days ago.

The newly-issued Regulations, which is based on Provisions on Management over Military Dogs issued on April 25, 1995, has made the top-level design and systematic specifications for the work of military dogs.

An important concept that runs through the Regulations is that military dogs have been rated as special combatants, an integral part of the military's combat capability and irreplaceable resource of military strength, according to a person-in-charge of the Serviceperson Bureau of the Force Structure and Discipline Department of the General Staff Headquarters of the PLA. This means that the missions and tasks of the military dogs of the PLA have been expanded to such fields as military operation, anti-terrorism and stability safeguarding from the traditional routine ones such as guarding, patrol as well as search and rescue.

The reporter learned that currently, the military dogs of the PLA are used at training institutions, airports, wharfs, missile positions, rear warehouses, front lines of frontier defense and coastal defense. For a long time, the work of the military dogs of the PLA has been under decentralized management and inefficient functioning due to outdated laws and regulations, unclear duties and weak infrastructure construction, which lags far behind the PLA's requirements for mission and task expansion.

The Regulations issued this time standardizes the positioning, classification and duties at all levels for military dogs, defines the breeding, feeding, sanitary and anti-epidemic work for military dogs, improves the replenishment, retirement and management system for military dogs, perfects the provisions on the specialized training and use of military dogs, providing law to abide by and rules to follow concerning the work of military dogs.