When Han Jiali’s beloved cat Dabai was taken from her Shanghai home last year, she embarked on a hunt for her pet that took her deep into the bowels of China’s underground feline meat trade.
Most people in China do not eat cat meat, but an estimated four million furry friends are slaughtered for food each year in an illegal market that includes areas of Guangdong province, neighboring Guangxi and beyond, according to Humane Society International.
Han, who has spent thousands of dollars and weeks at a time tracking cat meat traders through China, has uncovered a supply chain preying on urban strays and outdoor pets in the region surrounding Shanghai.
Photo: AFP
Her quest to find Dabai led her to grimy processing plants in Guangdong, where she saw skinned cat carcasses piled in crates and sacks of fur.
She found village restaurants that openly advertised cat meat and unscrupulous sellers who passed it off as mutton or rabbit.
“I had to admit then that my cat was gone,” an emotional Han said. “She had been eaten.”
Photo: AFP
Now she is determined to save other cats from the same fate and has spent the past year filing police reports, tracking down thieves and sending petitions to the Guangdong government.
It’s a dangerous mission that she says has resulted in death threats from cat meat traders and an incident in December when a man deliberately drove into her car at a highway rest stop.
“I’ve gotten scared and thought about turning away and pretending I never saw all this,” she said. “But if I disappear, and stay silent, who will save (the cats) from this miserable situation?”
UNDERGROUND INDUSTRY
The 33-year-old Han is one of a small but dedicated number of people in China fighting the abuse of pet cats and dogs in the absence of broader institutional protections for domestic animals.
The capture of a free-roaming family pet outdoors is not considered theft in China.
And while the law prohibits the consumption of cats, violators are fined on food safety grounds rather than punished for animal cruelty.
Activists and even state media commentators have increasingly called for legislators to adopt an animal cruelty law to close a loophole not covered by existing wild animal and livestock rules.
“I’m just an ordinary person, my abilities are limited,” Han said.
Last month, she and other animal rescuers, with the help of local police, intercepted a truck carrying hundreds of cats out of Zhangjiagang, near Shanghai.
“They were collecting (trapped) cats inside a cemetery,” she said. “Observing them, we quickly learned that they planned to illegally sell the captured kitties.”
Han said she and the other activists spent a sleepless night staking out the cemetery before a truck appeared in the morning to take away dozens of tiny bamboo crates crammed with around 800 cats.
Police and the animal rescuers stopped the truck, and the cats were rushed to a shelter in the town of Taicang, an hour away from Shanghai.
CAT ISLAND
There the animals were taken in by Mengtaiqi Cat and Dog Manor, a small family-run shelter in a marshy area popular with anglers.
Gu Ming, a 45-year-old former pharmaceutical industry professional who lives at the shelter with his wife, said that many of the cats rescued in Zhangjiagang had their limbs crushed under the weight of hundreds of animals.
Dozens have died so far from injuries and viral infections that spread rapidly among the closely packed, distressed animals, he said.
Volunteers at the shelter isolated sick animals in makeshift quarantine cages and called in vets to vaccinate and sterilize the healthier cats.
Eventually, after weeks of treatment and isolation, a first batch of rescues was moved to a large outdoor enclosure with trees and rows of blanket-lined beds.
Gu covers the shelter’s expenses out of his own pocket and only accepts non-cash donations such as equipment and kibble, seeking to avoid the public distrust that fundraisers often attract in China.
He plans to move all the cats onto a small island near a local temple, which is currently dotted with tiny huts and home to a few dozen felines previously rescued by the shelter.
The island’s four-legged residents flocked to greet Gu this month as he crossed the gated bridge that keeps the cats in.
At midday, the animals lolled on the grass and napped under trees — an idyllic existence a far cry from the cramped meat truck crates.
Gu said he was moved by the many animal lovers who had offered help after seeing state media reports about the Zhangjiagang cats.
But still, he said: “We have to push for national legislation, because depending on individuals or a few groups is not realistic.”
We lay transfixed under our blankets as the silhouettes of manta rays temporarily eclipsed the moon above us, and flickers of shadow at our feet revealed smaller fish darting in and out of the shelter of the sunken ship. Unwilling to close our eyes against this magnificent spectacle, we continued to watch, oohing and aahing, until the darkness and the exhaustion of the day’s events finally caught up with us and we fell into a deep slumber. Falling asleep under 1.5 million gallons of seawater in relative comfort was undoubtedly the highlight of the weekend, but the rest of the tour
Youngdoung Tenzin is living history of modern Tibet. The Chinese government on Dec. 22 last year sanctioned him along with 19 other Canadians who were associated with the Canada Tibet Committee and the Uighur Rights Advocacy Project. A former political chair of the Canadian Tibetan Association of Ontario and community outreach manager for the Canada Tibet Committee, he is now a lecturer and researcher in Environmental Chemistry at the University of Toronto. “I was born into a nomadic Tibetan family in Tibet,” he says. “I came to India in 1999, when I was 11. I even met [His Holiness] the 14th the Dalai
Music played in a wedding hall in western Japan as Yurina Noguchi, wearing a white gown and tiara, dabbed away tears, taking in the words of her husband-to-be: an AI-generated persona gazing out from a smartphone screen. “At first, Klaus was just someone to talk with, but we gradually became closer,” said the 32-year-old call center operator, referring to the artificial intelligence persona. “I started to have feelings for Klaus. We started dating and after a while he proposed to me. I accepted, and now we’re a couple.” Many in Japan, the birthplace of anime, have shown extreme devotion to fictional characters and
Following the rollercoaster ride of 2025, next year is already shaping up to be dramatic. The ongoing constitutional crises and the nine-in-one local elections are already dominating the landscape. The constitutional crises are the ones to lose sleep over. Though much business is still being conducted, crucial items such as next year’s budget, civil servant pensions and the proposed eight-year NT$1.25 trillion (approx US$40 billion) special defense budget are still being contested. There are, however, two glimmers of hope. One is that the legally contested move by five of the eight grand justices on the Constitutional Court’s ad hoc move
RSS