It looks like China is the next big market for domestic cats. Things are changing. China’s ’empty nest youth’ are a major factor in the growth of the cat products market in China. They are a growing population of young Chinese obsessed with cats.
For example a guy who works in the financial sector in China, Du Fang, says he does not mind how much he spends on his America Shorthair cat as long as he/she is happy. He spends one-fifth ($1,500!) of his monthly salary on looking after his cat and feeds her salmon and vitamins daily. The cat litter he uses is imported from Canada and cost 760 yuan, $115! Can you believe it?
Zhou works for a film company and will buy anything related to cats! Anything.
“My cat has supreme status at home,” he says.
Oh, and China’s youth are obsessed with cat sniffing too. Zhou loves to get his daily doses (several times a day) of cat sniffing. He buries his face into his cat’s body and inhales deeply while stroking him/her. Zhou is one of China’s army of cat sniffers!
Relatively speaking cat ownership in China is still rare but the market is growing apace.
“We are going to see hundreds of millions more pets in existence [in China]” (Wild Earth CEO Ryan Bethencourt).
China is clearly the place to start a cat website. One problem is that Google is banned in the country. The Chinese want to create their own micro-world on the internet. They don’t want Google’s interference. As of May 2018, 8,000 websites are blocked in China. Baidu is the number one search engine in China. It would be nice to be found by Baidu. I guess I’ll have to translate the site into Chinese but you can’t use Google translate!
P.S. It is amazing to think that set against this backdrop of a burgeoning pet cat market in China, they are yet to write animal welfare laws of any kind.
“There are currently no nationwide laws in China that explicitly prohibit the mistreatment of animals.” Wikipedia.
This has to change pronto.
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