Beijing rescuer Hu Yua keeps 250 cats in her apartment. “If I don’t take them in, the government will kill them.”
Reader Hannah sent us this in-depth article about the house cat holocaust going on China in preparation of the Beijing Olympics. The article and accompanying images are very disturbing, though there are some heartwarming tales of individual rescuers. Unlike Athens’s genocide against dogs before the 2004 Olympics, this horrible initiative isn’t even limited to strays. The government seems to be running a successful propaganda campaign claiming that cats are inherently dangerous and cause all sorts of diseases; many people are turning in their own pets “for safety’s sake.”
In slightly better news, the Indian state of Kashmir has canceled plans to poison thousands of stray dogs (the numbers vary widely from 2,000 to 100,000) in an attempt to stop rabies. After killing the first 500, authorities have decided to try sterilization instead.
More locally, have you read about the rescues of Phyllis the Bed Stuy Chicken or Denny the Bronx goat? Both happy endings for individuals, but reminders that there are still plenty of active slaughterhouses in New York City.
4 Comments
emmaaa
on #This makes me want to cry. Poor cats!!!
Roseann Marulli
on #Absolutely horrific, yes. And the line about terrified cats being “crammed into cages so small they cannot even turn around” sounds eerily familiar….
Ligo
on #I totally agree, Roseann. I learned about this on Sunday when Tibetans were protesting against the Beijing Olympics in union square. Very basically, they were trying to say that China was trying to deceive the world into thinking everything was okay in the country, but it isn’t. They have a looong way to go before meeting Olympic standards. I think even NYC could serve as a better candidate. My friend told me about the cat genocide and I was horrified as well, honestly.
AndrewJ
on #Yeh nobody cared about China’s Olympics helping the genocide in West Papua by paying Indonesia for deforesting that colony which the US forced the Netherlands to sell to Indonesia in 1962. So what else could you expect?