Here are some interesting pictures of cats in Beijing, China. The cats look sad because a lot of them are street cats and street cats anywhere look pretty sad. These cats don’t look like feral cats; more community cats. They look reasonably well fed. I find photographs of cats in China interesting because I would like to try and present a balanced and authentic view of what it is like to be a cat in China.

The slide show below runs automatically providing 8 seconds per picture. There are 10 photos. You can pause the slideshow by placing the mouse pointer over it and move it along using the left and right arrows.

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Beijing, formerly Peking, is the capital of China. I visited it in the early ’80s and it was very dusty and polluted. There was high incidence of throat cancer.

Without wishing to be unkind, the Chinese don’t have a great reputation for animal welfare including the welfare of their cats. Although the old lady and her cat companions shows us that there are many people in China who love cats.

“What does a cat lover do when they travel? Look for cats of course! Only saw 3 cats in 4 weeks while in Asia… I guess that’s pretty good.”…Gina (you can decide for yourself, why)

There are no animal welfare laws in China and there are a lot of street cats in Beijing (500,000?), many of which were slaughtered en masse before the Beijing Olympics. In the south of China there seems to be the habit of eating rounded up street cats or cats shipped by lorry in from other places; the whole process is undertaken in a brutal manner constituting gross animal abuse.

I noticed that a lot of Beijing cats were long haired piebald pattern cats. Many have the Turkish Van type markings or variations on it. That is, head markings (inverted V or vague variations) and a coloured tail on a white or mainly white torso.

In one photo you’ll see an white Exotic Shorthair (a shorthaired modern Persian) being held by a vet or a vet’s assistance.

The conditions under which, it appears, a lot of Chinese live, makes life less than ideal for the cats as well. That said, most of the pictures are of community cats. I could not find a picture of a nicely cossetted, full-time indoor, Chinese domestic cat.

The pictures are from Flickr and published under a creative commons license. The selection is representative of what I saw on Flickr.

Photo credits:

Cat and fish: by dahorsburgh

Photos by han D lei

• Old lady and ginger cat
• Old lady and black and white cat
• Unwell cat
• Group of cats
• Cat and vet

• Boy and cat by choubb
• Dirty cat by TheManDatCantBmoved
• Cat in tree by lithium42
• Cat and rock by ddkkpp