Whenever the media covers some story about an animal that has been rescued or neglected there are always dozens of people willing to adopt it.

It's a paradox because hundreds of thousands of abandoned dogs and cats are killed every year by the authorities. A good illustration of this paradox was the stray dog in Tokushima last month that was trapped on a reinforcing wall for six days. The rescue operation attracted major coverage and local authorities received calls from people all over Japan offering to adopt the dog. What wasn't widely reported was that there are a lot of stray dogs in the area where the rescue took place, since people in the vicinity abandon unwanted pets there. If the dog hadn't got trapped, it might have been rounded up with the other strays and gassed.

The mayor of Obihiro in Hokkaido recently tried to rally the media to save some other animals. For more than 50 years the city has run a race track where people bet on large workhorses that pull heavy sleds over a course. This sport, called banei keiba, has been losing money for years. According to a recent article in the Mainichi Shimbun, the cumulative debt for the race track is about 4 billion yen.