“Thousands of pet cats in Beijing are being abandoned by their owners and sent to die in secretive government pounds as http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2111 Games.
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1282
“Hundreds of cats a day are being rounded and crammed into cages so small they cannot even turn around.
“Then they are trucked to what animal welfare groups describe as death camps on the edges of the city.
“The cull comes in the wake of a government campaign warning of the diseases cats carry and ordering residents to help clear the streets of them.
“Cat owners, terrified by the disease warning, are dumping their pets in the streets to be picked up by special collection teams.
“Paranoia is so intense that six stray cats -including two pregnant females – were beaten to death with sticks by teachers at a Beijing kindergarten, who feared they might pass illnesses to the children.
“China’s leaders are convinced that animals pose a serious urban health risk and may have contributed to the outbreak of SARS – a deadly respiratory virus – in 2003.” Even if you despise cats – and I know that there are many of you out there – you cannot help but be struck dumb with outrage over this completely unnecessary, draconian, and positively medieval method of controlling the cat population. Any western nation could have helped the Chinese with this problem and it could have been done much more humanely and without the government using deliberate scare tactics to jack up the citizenry and turn them against cats.
When I wrote of the medieval methods used against cats by the Chinese I was not using allegory. Whipping up a frenzy of emotion against cats was a favorite ploy of the church in the middle ages. In something of a delicious irony (from the cat’s perspective) when our ancestors had killed off most of the cats in Europe, invading rats overran the continent. They bore fleas that http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3040 that killed of a third of its population. In their frenzy to burn witches and murder their “familiars,” Europeans were unwittingly sealing their doom by eliminating their only salvation against the plague carrying rats – cats.
But the Chinese efforts at eliminating cats are not just being done for health reasons. These Communist bozos are so intent on making a good impression for the Olympics that they don’t want a bunch of stray cats wandering around the venues:
“But the crackdown on cats is seen by animal campaigners as just one of a number of extreme measures being taken by communist leaders to ensure that its capital appears clean, green and welcoming during the Olympics.
“Polluting factories in and around the city are being ordered to shut down or relocate during the Games to ease Beijing’s choking smog and drivers are allowed out on to the roads only three times a week.
“Fares on the city’s underground network have been cut to just two yuan (14p) for any journey – a six-fold reduction on some routes – to keep people off buses, and beggars and street sleepers are being moved to out-of-town camps or given train fares back to their home provinces.
“Meanwhile, taxi drivers have been made to attend lessons in how to greet passengers politely in English and a city-wide courtesy campaign has been launched to teach Beijing’s notoriously dour and grumpy citizens how to smile and be pleasant to foreigners.
“The cull of Beijing’s estimated 500,000 cat population is certain to provoke international outrage as it comes just over a year after the Chinese were criticised for rounding up and killing stray dogs across the country.”
I apologize to you dog lovers out there. If I had known of that barbarism, I would have been just as outraged I assure you.
http://rightwingnuthouse.com/archives/2008/03/09/cat-holocaust-in-china/