Yes, guess what, this story could only come out of the country where there are no animal welfare laws and where the ‘government’ have no intention of creating any. The story has China written all over it. The story comes from Chengdu in the southwest of China. I visited Bejing in 1971. It was so polluted you’d eat the air as you biked along the street; crunch, crunch as you ate the mass of pollutants suspended in the atmosphere.
Huang Pingfu was considered a model animal lover by his neighbours because he kept 20 pedigree cats (we don’t know the breeds but they are probably Persians and perhaps Siamese). He kept them in air conditioned luxury. Oh so cosy and pleasant…except around 12 miles from his home he had a slaughterhouse for cats. These were street or unwanted domestic cats. He advertised for them. He encouraged people to bring to him stray cats for him to adopt. Only he was not adopting. He was slaughtering.
He killed 100 a day.
“After you chop off their heads and cut them into parts, nobody can tell if the meat is cat or rabbit.”
Yes, he sold the meat as rabbit to local restaurants and wholesalers. His turnover was £50,000 annually.
In China his operation is not illegal except for one aspect: he described cat meat as rabbit meat. But for that he’d get off scot free. An animal rescue tipped off a local newspaper. Shocking pictures were posted in the Chengdu Business Daily. Forty-nine cats were rescued alive. A tonne of carcasses were discovered. Some of the cats were floating in the pools to drown them. He had a machine to remove the fur.
“This is not illegal, what’s wrong with me buying and selling cats?” Mr Pingfu screams.
Well, sir, if there were some damn animal welfare laws in your damn country it would be criminal. What you are doing is criminal. It is certainly totally immoral by the standards of most citizens on the planet. It is shockingly inhumane and you need to be thoroughly re-educated combined with a frontal lobotomy.
The international business community needs to put pressure on China to introduce animal welfare laws. All they have to do is copy the UK’s Animal Welfare Act 2006. It isn’t that hard. Just translate the thing. It is quite short. Of course a slew of businesses across the country would have to shut down once the law was enacted. There lies the problem. In China business supersedes animal welfare and decency.
Me too. There is something lacking in the brain of these Chinese individuals and something dark in the Chinese culture. It is so obviously immoral and deeply inhumane and yet, they don’t see it. My favoured assessment is that the Chinese in China have failed to develop – they are stuck in the 13th century – when it comes to animal welfare.