"I personally can understand why the government would implement such laws. This is a safety issue. When people who are afraid of dogs are confronted by a dog that is not leashed, problems are going to occur," says Gloeckner.

"It's not the dog's fault that it's running all over the place and scaring people. Dogs behave like 4-yearold kids. They don't know any better. That's why we need to leash and train them."

With regard to ethics, education would also go a long way to changing some people's attitude toward animals, says Nidhin Nair, an animal rescuer in Shanghai.

Earlier this year, Nair managed to identify the owner of a lost Alaskan malamute after picking it up from the police station. What happened next left him at a loss for words.

"When I called the owner and told her that I found her dog, she started laughing and sounded surprise that it was still alive. She said the dog was abandoned about a month ago because she simply couldn't afford to keep him anymore," he says.

"On another occasion, at a pet shelter in Minhang district in Shanghai, I came across a woman who said she wanted to abandon her dog because she was pregnant. She even tried to justify her actions, saying that she was paying the shelter to take the dog in and not just leaving it on the streets. To these people, dogs and cats are just commodities."

But the mistreatment of animals does not just affect the pets - it also has the potential to create rifts in society. In 2016, animal activists in Chengdu publicly beat up a dog owner who was found to have recorded a video of himself abusing his pet before sharing the footage on his QQ social network.

China currently does not have laws pertaining to the protection of pets. In an interview with Sixth Tone, Zhang Xiaohai of Beijing Loving Animals Foundation was quoted as saying that "an anti-animal abuse law was proposed by scholars in 2009, but it hasn't been scheduled on the legislative agenda yet".