Paw things: ‘3 tons’ of smuggled cats buried alive in Vietnam
Off the menu: 600 plump cats escape slaughter after China truck crash
Published time: January 17, 2013 17:50
Edited time: January 17, 2013 21:50
Edited time: January 17, 2013 21:50
Volunteers hauled the cats from the overturned lorry in the central city of Changsha. Around one hundred felines, however, died in the accident while others escaped, says Xu Chenxin of the Changsha Small Animal Protection Association.
The cats, most of them plump and white, were heading to restaurants in the southern Guandong province, the China Daily reported.
“It was easy to tell they were meant to be eaten, from looking at the crates you could tell their owners didn’t care if they were alive or dead. When I arrived, the truck was piled high with more than 50 crates. The cats had travelled for days, without water or food, and the smell was dreadful” Xu told AFP on Monday.
The volunteer group which recued the felines negotiated with one of the trucks drivers to buy the animals for 10,000 yuan ($1,600) and they were now awaiting adoption.
“We’ve already had inquiries from families across Changsha,” said Xu.
Activists often come to the rescue of animals in China. In one of the biggest occasions they bought around 500 dogs intended for the dining table from a convoy of trucks on a highway in Beijing in 2011.
China does not have laws to protect non-endangered animals such as cats and dogs. Although cats are not commonly served up as dinner in Chinese restaurants, some establishments, especially in the south, will put cat on the menu.
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Police said on Wednesday that they had intercepted a truck carrying 3 tons of cats that had been stashed in bamboo baskets the previous week. The truck driver was issued a smuggling fine of 7.5 million dong ($360) – but for animals the story ended in a much more gruesome way.
“The cats were from China, with no official origin papers and no quarantine,” an unnamed police officer from the Dong Da district environmental police told AFP.
The officer was unable to confirm how many of the cats had been buried alive, but said that they had to be disposed of to ensure there were no environmental and health risks: “Several of them had died, there was a terrible smell that could affect the environment and carried risks of future diseases. Therefore, we culled them by burying them.”
Despite the 1998 law prohibiting the sale of cats as food, cat meat, locally known as “little tiger,” is still not hard to come by in Vietnam’s specialty restaurants, especially in the country’s northern part that borders China. The prohibition of the cat trade was implemented in order to save local crops from rats.
Animal rights activists have been trying to stop the cat culls in Vietnam. The Asian Canine Protection Alliance is one of the organizations behind the movement. It said that there had been “inhumane stories as to how the [cats] may have been destroyed,” urging authorities to end the cruel practice.
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