SHANGHAI, May 18 — Police in southern China have detained a man accused of trying to poison a dog that gained online fame for collecting plastic bottles.

The French Bulldog, named Xiaobai, became a social media sensation last year after videos showed it diligently gathering bottles for its owner, identified only by his surname Zhang. The account has more than half a million followers, with some clips viewed up to 10 million times, according to the South China Morning Post.

Zhang told local media that on May 7, a “good‑hearted” internet user alerted him with screenshots from an animal abuse group discussing plans to poison Xiaobai.

He said members of the group had circulated his home address and discussed using isoniazid, a drug prescribed for tuberculosis, to kill the dog. Later that day, a man dressed in white was spotted outside Zhang’s courtyard taking photographs.

Zhang reported the matter to police, handing over chat records and surveillance footage. Authorities informed him that a suspect was taken into custody on May 8. The case remains under investigation.

Before the arrest, Zhang said he had kept Xiaobai indoors. He noted the dog appeared listless during that period but became lively again once allowed outside to resume collecting bottles.

“It is maybe not functionally possible to design social networked technology geared towards listening. I don’t know, I’m not that smart. But the fact that the internet doesn’t have a mechanism for listening means that we’ve invented these kludgy quantification mechanisms to try and detect attention, and it is easy, so incredibly easy there are multiple books written about this, to confuse the thing you’re measuring for the metric itself.

I want to know who is visiting my site and whether they’re returning visitors and what pages they clicked through and for how long because it gives me the illusion of knowledge and control. Maybe I’ll know my project is connecting with people if I just hit some arbitrary threshold of pageviews, subscribers, conversion rate.

But none of that will tell me the thing I actually want to know, which is: am I making a difference?”

Hey I loved this. It also reminded me to go check up on the phone line and see if there were any messages that needed witnessing. I keep them close to the chest because that’s part of the project, but I will say that there were and they moved me to tears. Maybe that’s what it’s all about.