A Chinese woman stuck in a 14-day quarantine watched helplessly via a surveillance camera as her dog demolished her living room and wardrobe

• A woman in China watched her dog destroy her house while she was away in quarantine.
• The woman watched from a surveillance camera as the dog ruined her wardrobe and furniture.

A woman required to quarantine for 14 days amid a COVID-19 outbreak in the Chinese city of Xi'an saw her house turned upside down by her dog as she monitored her living room through a surveillance camera.

The owner, identified as Liu by the Chinese media outlet HouLang News, said she wasn't allowed to bring pets into quarantine with her, so she prepared enough food for her dog, set up a surveillance camera, and left it alone at home.

After Liu left, the dog sat at the front door, waiting for her to return. On the second day, the dog became agitated and started ripping apart her sofa, the dog owner said in a video published by HouLang News that's accrued 12 million views on the Chinese social-media platform Weibo.

"Every single day, it was tearing up the house. Every single day it was destroying a new item. Almost everything in the house is broken now," Liu said.

Footage from Monday afternoon showed Liu's dog chewing a hole through her sofa and rummaging through a wardrobe as an assortment of household items lay strewn across the floor, with broken furniture in the background.

"It destroyed all of my bags, my shoes, and my clothes," Liu said, adding that she had a week left of quarantine and had already started buying new furniture online.

Her story has prompted some Weibo users to advocate that pets be allowed to go with their owners to quarantine, in a discussion that's reached 310 million views, the platform said. Others asked if a pet volunteer program or government agencies could step in to care for animals left behind by owners in quarantine.

Last month, Xi'an, a city of 13 million, experienced one of China's worst COVID-19 outbreaks since the original outbreak in Wuhan — a disaster for Beijing's COVID-zero plan to eliminate the virus. In early January, after two weeks of lockdowns, officials said the coronavirus situation in Xi'an was "under control," AFP reported, though many remained in quarantine or under lockdown.

Despite the damage to her home, Liu considered herself lucky. "At least my dog is still healthy. It hasn't eaten anything that bad. In seven days, we can return home, and things will get better," she said. "The house may be trashed, but we can clean it up, and it'll be okay."

Chinese authorities have repeatedly struggled with what to do with pets while residents quarantine. In Shangrao in the eastern Jiangxi province, city officials apologized after a city employee entered a citizen's home and beat a dog to death last November while the owner was quarantining in a hotel. Several reports also emerged in 2021 of cats being killed in various Chinese cities while their owners were sent to quarantine.