CHINA: "Grab that cat," screamed the shop assistant in Jenny Lou's store. Within minutes, masked men armed with poles and nooses appeared, and chased the creature through the door and into the street.
Fears that cats, dogs and other pets are hosts for SARS are sparking one of China's regular persecution campaigns against household pets.
Pest extermination patrols are out in force, and their work is being aided by informers among residents who become upset even by the sight of dogs on the streets.
"I told my employer I'm not going to walk her dog anymore," declared Xiao Cui, a maid for a foreign family who live in Beijing suburbs.
"She might fire me but I'm terrified I can get the disease and be sent to the hospital."
The Beijing Star Daily, a popular tabloid, carried the story of a pet owner in the Fengtai district who threw his dog out of a sixth-storey window for fear it had caught SARS.
In another well-publicised case, a dog was beaten to death after it sneezed while waiting for his owner at an open-air market.
As news spread that pets of SARS victims would be put down by the authorities, some owners have opted to abandon their dogs.
Soon after taking control of the city in 1949, the Communists began rounding up and exterminating all dogs, including household pets, declaring that canines were unproductive beasts who ate an undeserved share of the food grown by peasants
In the mid-1990s, the state issued regulations authorising citizens to keep certain kinds of dogs provided they were not more than 35cm high.
On the other hand, the "people's war" against SARS is helping those campaigning to protect China's endangered animals from being eaten in up-market restaurants.
Some suspect the Cantonese passion for feasting on exotic animals - the rarer the more valued - is connected to the sudden emergence of SARS, perhaps a mutation which sprang up when wild and domestic animals came into contact in the markets catering for southern appetites.
"We look down at Guangdong people for eating all kinds of flying and crawling creatures, but what some Beijing people have done to dogs is worse than killing and eating them," says Li Aimei, a real estate woman who was pressured by her family to put her pet into a shelter.
The state media are condemning the eating of unusual animals, which became ever more popular in China as living standards rose.
A recent survey by the State Forest Administration conducted in 21 Chinese cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, found that 46 per cent of those surveyed have tried wild game.
Some 45 per cent believe that eating wild animals can boost one's energies and replenish a body's deficiencies.
Beijing has closed the few restaurants which specialised in dishing up frogs, snakes, dogs, rare birds and mammals, but it will be harder to eradicate the practice in Guangdong where the SARS virus originated.
That province reported just 17 new cases yesterday, but Beijing had 94 new cases and two deaths.
The total number of SARS infections in the country rose by 146 to 4,698, and the death toll is now 224.