RELATED: China, Confucius and Cats
This is a tragic and, in some ways, charming cat video from China. The mother cat decided to make a common street garbage can her den in which to give birth and raise her kittens. There are many ways to interpret this feline tragi-comedy. It is ironic, sad and wrong, or all of these descriptions. It is ironic as some callous people throw their cats away in garbage dumps. We see the videos on social media. In the video on this page, it is as if the female cat is telling the world they are being treated as garbage. It is a visual statement. And sadly, too many people do treat cats as garbage and often it is kittens. Sometimes they are placed alive in black bags and thrown out with the food waste. I’ve seen that on the internet. The reason why we have seen it is because a kind person rescues the kittens and announces it on social media. But how many are not rescued? How many silently die without any record or the knowledge of anyone except the perpetrator of the crime? Many is the answer.
RELATED: China Animal Welfare DOWNING STREET PETITION
The video comes from a Chinese social media website (weibo.com). It is a good idea to occasionally visit Chinese and other Asian social media websites to ensure that we, in the West, see the other side of the world. There is too much ‘us and them’. There is not enough communication between the East and the West. There are entirely different philosophies and the attitude towards animal welfare is also very different but we need to engage, I think.
NOTE: there are millions of cat loving Chinese in China. Some are fighting against the cat and dog meat trade. This needs to be said.
China is very advanced in technology and yet very backward in animal welfare. They are held back by their history which includes a mass of superstitions. Superstitions about the health benefits of eating certain animals inevitably leads to animal cruelty. It actually led to Covid. Yes, superstitions about eating pangolin scales or bats led to the transmission of the Covid virus from animals to humans. And superstition leads to the mass cruelty of the cats and dogs rounded up for the cat and dog meat trade in China and other Asian countries, which most people in the West see as very objectionable. The trade exists partly because of superstition that cat meat cures arthritis (or something like that – mumbo jumbo) and because there are no mainstream animal welfare laws in China; an advanced and backward nation. Remarkably, the people who round up the animals sometimes steal pets. Many dogs rescued from the back of lorries have collars. So, this is not only an exercise in mass cruelty by mass criminal behavior.
I visited China in the late 1970s. I remember cycling in Bejing. The air was so thick with pollution I could crunch down on it with my teeth! Throat cancer was and perhaps still is very high in China due to pollution. They are belatedly tackling it.
Below are some pages on China.
