Libertarian Vegan

More reports continue to come out on the cat meat trade in Guangdong province, China.  LA Times reporter Barbara Demick tells the tale of one feline -

“The gray tabby cat with hazel eyes and a white nose scrunched at the bottom of a stack of metal cages filled with rabbits, quail, pigeons and ducks, across the aisle from the buckets of turtles and scorpions in a narrow shop with as many live animals as a petting zoo.

If it was male or female, young or old, nobody seemed to know or care. All that mattered was its weight, 6 1/2 pounds.”

The shopkeeper offered to sell her the cat for $9, or about $1.32/lb, and would even slaughter it right there for her.

While dogs are eaten in many parts of China, it is only in Guangdong that they eat cats.  It is part of Cantonese cuisine, which is known as the most exotic of Chinese cuisines.  However, cat loving Chinese are beginning to draw the line.

Last week there was a demonstration at the Guangzhou train station, where protesters carried banners reading, “Cats are your friends, not food.”  They were attempting to stop a shipment of cats.  According to the Small Animal Protection Association, one Guangzhou based business captures up to 10,000 cats a day from different parts of China, paying around $1.50 per cat.

While many pets have disappeared, the police have been reluctant to charge cat catchers with theft as many cats live outside and are technically not owned by anyone, just fed and cared for by them.  Without the police, then, increasing numbers of cat lovers have begun taking action on their own.

Lu Di, nearly 80 years old, is the founder of the Small Animal Protection Association.  She used to work for Mao Tse-tung, reading to him in his later years when his eyes were bad.  Now she and her organization lead many of the efforts to save cats.  Paraphrasing Ghandi she said, “You can judge how advanced a civilization is by the way it treats its animals.”

Demick described the trade, “Often, the cats are badly mistreated in their final moments, crammed as tightly as tomatoes into crates so they can’t breathe, and clubbed into semiconsciousness before being thrown alive into boiling water.”

Delightful.

In good news, however, Demick did end up purchasing the gray tabby cat, releasing it into a field where a local woman told her “Oh, we really need a cat here.  There are mice in the empty lot.”

Source - Los Angeles Times - Chinese seek to pull cats from the menu December 22, 2008

 I suppose there is not much to add to this.  It is a horrible and disgusting practice.

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