All Animals Matter

An ever-increasingly prosperous nation, China is so large it can barely address the issues of human rights in a meaningful way. So it’s not surprising that animal rights is merely a term that do not have much meaning either. A country that adopts child labor practices, neglects the poor and disenfranchised, oppresses the Tibetans, consumes companion animals, cuts off fins from sharks and throws them back in the ocean to drown, how can we expect anything less?

With the Olympics coming, Beijing is getting ready–cleaning up the streets, beautifying the city, demonstrating its industrial power to the world. But one act in particular is outright barbaric– the killings of cats. This is two-fold: 1) the government uses scare tactics by terrifying its citizens that cats carry diseases, into surrendering the animals; and 2) use the Olympics as an excuse to clean up the streets by exterminating them. China has once did this with dogs for fear of rabies and SARS, and the way in which they destroy these poor animals are cruel and disgusting.

Without the cats, mice and rats will increase by numbers, and the chances of the rodents carrying and transmitting diseases will be even more detrimental.

Right now as we speak, cats are rounded up by the thousands into large crates and trucked off to what animal welfare groups describe as death camps on the edges of the city. The estimated number of extermination will be in the half a million, just over a year after the Chinese were criticized for beating and killing stray dogs across the country and selling them for aphrodisiac effects in their meat. The U.K.’s Daily Mail reports that these cats go to the camps, if not destroyed right away, are trapped and crammed into cages and waiting to die slow, agonizing deaths. Let’s just call this Beijing’s own cat holocaust.

I’m Chinese, and I am ashamed of my country and not only because of the cats, obviously. I will never visit there until something changes for the better. Look at the picture above, how does it not break your heart completely? Please help by spreading the word of this atrocity.