I see nobody in the comments actually bothered reading the article. It’s not that cat meat is illegal, it’s that they were passing it off as pork and beef. Also some speculation that the cats might have been stolen
Also some speculation that the cats might have been stolen
Almost has to be the case. There is a reason no one farms cats as meat, they are obligate carnivores that will eat more meat than they ever produce. It isn’t economical to produce cats for meat if you have to actually feed them. It only makes sense to “harvest” them wild on the streets or from kitten mills, shelters, vets, wherever you find spare cats in China.
Framing animals for meat only really makes sense if those animals eat lower on the food chain. Turning grass / grains into meat makes sense. Turning meat into meat doesn’t, especially since the cats would pretty much have to be eating more desirable meat that they produce. Imagine feeding pork, fish, and chicken to cats in order to make cat meat.
I was feeling the same way, but maybe machine translated rather than machine written?
Looking at a bias site, it looks like they aren’t known for just posting nonsense, though I guess this could be anti-Chinese propaganda:
anti-Chinese
Anti-China *
Straits Times is a Singaporean newspaper, and Singapore is a majority-Chinese country. As a Chinese myself, it stings when people automatically assume I’m a China national. This is pretty similar to Jews having to clarify that Israel does not represent them.
Note that I’m not actually commenting on the article, no idea about its accuracy.
I’m trying to get your point. But a jew indicates a person of Jewish religion. In most dictionaries “Chinese” will mean “someone or something from China”. I don’t know what the word meant before the nation China arose or if there are ethnic meanings to it, but words mean what people understand them to mean, that’s language, so Chinese kinda means “from China” today. That’s why America now kinda means the country and democracy means republic or other form of majority-rule representative democracy 🤷 (the two lost words I miss the most)
Yes, its totally unreasonable for people to conclude that a person who self-identifies as “Chinese” is from China.
100% this.
If using cats as feed animals is illegal, they should reference the laws, and have quotes from the police officers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_meat Cat meat is meat. Different cultures have different viewpoints on it. this article should contextualize about the culture the story is from.
if they “rescued 1000 cats” from being sold as pork meat, that means at least 1,000,000 cats are sold as pork every day… this is just a little show for the newspapers…
so if you’re actually in China right now eating what you think is “pork”, Bon Appetit i guess
if they “rescued 1000 cats” from being sold as pork meat, that means at least 1,000,000 cats are sold as pork every day
What kind of logic is that? Why stop at a million, why not a billion.
this is China… maybe you don’t understand how big China is, and how many people live there… how many servings of “pork” fried rice get served every day… or how their law enforcement works… only the crooks who don’t pay the cops enough get caught…
You’re telling a Chinese guy he doesn’t understand China. Nice mansplaining (racesplaining?).
I’m pointing out the ridiculousness of drawing assumptions and calculating frequency of events from a single incident. Yes, I’m sure it happens. How frequently it happens is harder to say. It’s as if somebody sneezed and you declared an epidemic is happening in your town. One data point is an anecdote, not data.
Pigs are way way nicer animals than cars. Cats are evil and grumpy. A pig is cheerful and friendly
I’m just wondering how you get enough meat off a cat that it’s worthwhile. Most livestock are herbivores because herbivores are larger and much easier to feed. Cats are obligate carnivores, even if you’re feeding them scrap meat you’re going to wind up with them eating far more meat than they produce and I can’t imagine that they produce much usable meat. It just seems like it would be easier and cheaper to just raise actual pigs than to try and get the same amount of meat off of a bunch of cats.
I doubt they are farming the cats so much as collecting them from the streets and everywhere else.
Even so rounding up a bunch of cats still seems like the most high effort way to get meat compared to literally any other animal. Even just talking about wrangling strays, dogs seem like a better choice because then you at least get a bit more meat. Cats just don’t seem like they would have enough usable meat to even be worth the effort of butchering them. Unless these are some especially chunky feral cats, all the ones I’ve seen are basically just fur and bone.
It’s pretty easy to trap feral cats. Feral dogs are less common and harder to deal with. It really only takes bait as a recurring expense, at about say 10 cents per cage to get 1-2 pounds of meat that is worth at least $1per pound is pretty good return.
Ah speciesism again…
From the article, the crime is not that they are selling cat meat, but that they’re mislabelling it as pork and beef
cats and dogs matter, but cows, chickens, lambs, sheep, pigs etc don’t matter. Yep. Makes sense :/
They all have the same capacity to suffer. So why look after some animals but not others?
From a pure practical standpoint, it doesn’t make sense to eat carnivores. Terrible feed conversion. We don’t want to raise meat to feed it to meat. Traditionally, ruminants were a way of converting inedible grass into nutritious meat and dairy.
Also, carnivores are a lot harder to handle… They bite! Cats jump and dogs dig. I farm. The livestock stay inside the fence, cats and dogs go where they please.
The animals in your first list are carnivores (cats are an obligate carnivore) while the second list are herbivores or omnivores that do well on a vegetarian diet. That’s why we eat the second list and not the first.
Also humans like dogs, they’re a lot like us despite being a smelly 4-legged bitey critter. It’s quite odd, really. We’ve evolved together for millennia at this point. More so than any other species on earth, dogs have a place in our society alongside humans, with their own jobs and skill sets.
My bullshit detector is going off hard over this article, and I’m a vegetarian. With those disclaimers out of the way, if you think the suffering of a cat and cow are equal, and accept that some people are going to eat meat, you get a hell of a lot more meat out of a cow than a cat.
Eating someones pet is different than eating an animal being raised to be eaten. For starters you have to kidnap the pet.
how is it different? They all have the same capacity to suffer. They’re all living, breathing beings. They all experience pain and suffering. How’s it different?
Right ? I should be allowed to abuse and manipule people freely if I label them as “Slave” !
