Police rescue 150 cats headed for dinner tables in China

Beijing — Practically 150 cats bound for slaughterhouses have been rescued by police in jap China, an intercontinental animal welfare business mentioned. The animals were being crammed into rusty cages when they have been discovered by police in the eastern town of Jinan in Shandong province, Humane Modern society International said in a statement Tuesday.

A gang positioned sparrows in cages as bait and used a remote control to shut the traps as quickly as each individual cat entered, an activist with area animal legal rights group VShine claimed.

“It was stunning to see the condition they were being in, many of them emaciated and crying out,” an activist, who only presented their very last name Huang, claimed in a assertion to the society. “Our discovery of dozens of reside sparrows employed as bait to lure the cats was also a major shock.”

Most of the rescued felines are considered to have been residence animals and have been sent to nearby animal shelters, the assertion included.

Activists also found 31 sparrows — a guarded species in China — at the scene and produced them again into the wild.

China has no laws towards animal cruelty, but the suspects could experience penalties for searching the birds, assets theft and for violations of animal epidemic avoidance guidelines.

About 10 million dogs and 4 million cats are killed for human intake just about every yr in China, according to the culture.

Canine and cat meat is regarded as a delicacy in some pieces of China, and the trade in their flesh continues to be rewarding sufficient to spur criminal gangs to steal animals, however the habit has viewed a regular decline as pet ownership has risen.

Every June, the city of Yulin in southern China hosts a puppy meat competition, where by are living canines and cats are marketed for eating.

The tradition of taking in puppies and cats in south China’s Guangdong and Guangxi provinces dates back thousands of yrs.

“These are China’s two major cat meat ingesting hotspots,” Dr. Peter Li, China coverage expert for the society, claimed in a assertion. “All over the rest of mainland China, cat meat is not component of the food society at all.”

The COVID-19 outbreak appears to have even further decreased the hunger for cat and puppy meat, right after the illness was joined to a market in the central city of Wuhan advertising are living animals for food items.

China banned the use and trade of wildlife in 2020.

The Guangdong towns of Shenzhen and Zhuhai banned the use of canine and cats in April that yr, becoming the initially cities in China to do so.