Via Yahoo News: SKorean soldiers guard bird flu zones amid cull. Excerpt:

South Korean soldiers have guarded quarantine zones around two poultry farms hit by bird flu, as officials started slaughtering hundreds of thousands of birds in an expanded cull.

A total of 236 soldiers wearing protective suits and goggles were deployed at 17 checkpoints near the farms on the outskirts of the southern city of Iksan, the first time the military has been called in to help in the crisis.

Some 155,000 birds, mostly chickens, have already been culled and buried. On Friday, about 180 government workers started killing 600,000 more on 35 farms within a three-kilometer (two-mile) radius of the outbreaks.

"The soldiers are deployed on roads leading to the farm to help control the movements of vehicles and people as the cull is underway in the area," the defence ministry said in a statement Friday.

"All the solders have had vaccine injections and swallowed Tamiflu," it said, referring to an oral anti-viral drug used for treating influenza.

Quarantine officials had originally begun culling poultry within 500 meters (546 yards) of the two sites of infection. More than 400 pigs and eight dogs were also killed.

But the agriculture ministry decided at an emergency meeting Thursday to slaughter all poultry within three kilometers after the potentially deadly H5N1 virus was detected at a second farm.

The story goes on to say that only eight dogs, all of them living on or near the chicken farm, have been killed. The authorities don't plan to kill any more. Evidently the political reaction to the killing of dogs was bigger than anticipated. If dogs and cats really can be vectors of H5N1, fighting a pandemic could be complicated by people's affection for their pets.