Blacky, Tramp, and Bobby: The Forgotten Dog Purge in Hong Kong’s Progressive Seventies

1970s Hong Kong is usually remembered as a period of optimism, progress, and constructive reinvention. The MacLehose administration, the longest in the history of British Hong Kong, introduced a series of social reforms—free education, more housing projects, better social welfare, etc.—to regain local support following the social disturbances of 1966 and 1967. The well-publicised ‘Hongkong Clean Campaign,’ which ran for years in hopes of improving the city’s sanitation, was more than a call to sweep the city’s streets and housing estates clean. Delving into the anti-dog movement that climaxed during the campaign, my study sheds light on the darker side of Hong Kong’s progressive seventies. It aims to show that on the other side of the Hong Kong administration’s attempts to improve general sanitation, the city-wide cleanup saw the construction and subsequent purging of certain ‘undesirables.’ This resulted in the irrational slaughter of thousands of dogs and the restructuring of human-canine relations, particularly with the lumping of domesticated, stray, and feral dogs into the same category of ‘nuisance.’