Local authorities in Xintian county, Central China’s Hunan Province, have ordered immediate rectification to the local market where live cats are found to have been slaughtered for sales after it attracted huge attention and sparked heated criticism on Chinese social media.
According to an announcement that the Xintian government published on Friday, local authorities have strictly prohibited the killing and selling of live cats in the market and started carrying out a full-scale investigation into relevant acts on Thursday.
The government will trace the purchasing channels of the cats to the source and cut off the sales chain, it said.
The Global Times on Friday learned from a local volunteer group who helped to settle the cats saved from the market that all eight saved cats are suffering from severe stress reactions and difficulty eating. They were taken care of in a volunteer’s home and now have been sent to a pet hospital in Hunan’s capital city Changsha.
“The number of cats kept in the market is large, roughly hundreds,” said another volunteer who was also one of the reporters that took the case online on Tuesday.
The volunteer group and some netizens called on the local authorities to find and publish where the unsold cats had been settled.
The case was first brought to public attention and caused a huge wave of criticism after a video went viral online which shows a market vendor taking a cat out of an iron cage, beating it on the head with what looked like a metal stick and finally put it in a basket.
A picture involved in the video shows that the slaughtered cats were sold at a price of 19 yuan ($3) per kilogram.
The agriculture bureau of Yongzhou, the city where Xintian is located, said there are no related quarantine rules for living cats, and the animal is also beyond the scope of agricultural products testing, according to the Beijing Youth Daily.
Fu Jian, a lawyer from Henan Yulong Law Firm, noted in the Beijing Youth Daily report that it is not illegal to kill a cat and sell it as the Criminal Law prohibits the hunting, killing and selling of animals, but only limited it to rare and endangered wild animals, not cats.
However, some cats slaughtered are wild, and the unknown bacteria they might carry is likely to bring infectious diseases. Therefore, an act of selling cat meat could be considered a crime of “producing and selling poisonous and harmful food,” Fu said.
Fu added that the slaughtering of cats is not in line with contemporary social values as cats are deemed as pets instead of traditional livestock.
A cat cafe opens in Shanghai, March 12, 2018. The cafe owner believed having some friendly kitties aside is relaxing to customers. The idea of cat-themed cafes originated in Japan, and soon spread to Taiwan, Hong Kong and other mainland cities. (Photo: China News Service/Yin Liqin)
