I am not sure whether I should write about this. I feel I have two but it’s just too cruel, too mad, too crazy and utterly unacceptable. There must be a huge amount of panic in China at the moment as this coronavirus pandemic gets up speed and you can almost sense the fear building up within the citizens of China.
I reported a few days ago that some cat owners were throwing their cats out of high-rise apartment windows and the same goes for dog owners. They think that their pets are going to spread the disease to them and kill them. In this instance a cat lover had been quarantined in a hospital. He was confined there despite not being diagnosed with the coronavirus disease. While he was in hospital he had arranged with his landlords to leave his cat on his balcony for a friend to come along to pick up later on.
It is reported that someone then entered his apartment, stuffed the cat into a plastic bag and buried it on nearby wasteland. When the cat’s owner left quarantine he was confronted by his landlord who said that the cat had been buried as a public health emergency response. It appears that the landlord is a company and that they said that they were following national orders to “control or kill infected wild animals, livestock and poultry”. Domestic cats don’t fit these categories.
I genuinely fear for all the domestic cats and dogs in China at this moment. There is a real possibility that hundreds of thousands perhaps millions may be killed over the forthcoming months. It is an absolutely desperate situation and it cannot be emphasised strongly enough. Where there is panic like this anything can happen and this horrendous story indicates just that.
Apparently fake rumours are spreading like wildfire in China. There appear to be a genuine belief that domestic cats and dogs can spread this disease because they can become infected themselves. They are innocent victims of indecent behaviour by humans in selling and slaughtering exotic wild animals in a live food market. The problem is not cats and dogs but people.
People should stop panicking and start seeing sense. I’ve seen a video of the police arresting and bundling a person into a van because he was not wearing a mask. It is known that masks do not prevent infection of the person wearing the mask. The mask prevents an infected person infecting others or it helps to prevent that. Infection is transmitted to other people in water droplets which are then ingested via the mouth. The masks are quite loose fitting and they cannot provide a sure barrier to the infection being transmitted to the person wearing one.
Personally, I am in despair about this because it is people compounding their earlier failures. It is people being cruel to animals. It is a horror story and every time I casually surf the Internet I bump into another story such as this one which makes me feel sick.
