With quarantine looming after a positive COVID-19 test, Shanghai resident Sarah Wang said that her first worry was who would look after her cat.
China’s pursuit of “zero COVID-19” means anyone who catches the virus is sent to central facilities, sometimes for weeks, leaving their pets at the mercy of local authorities.
Aside from fears the animals would be unfed or abandoned, a video showing a health worker in Shanghai bludgeoning a corgi dog to death this month caused uproar among residents — with some taking matters into their own hands.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The video created “pure panic,” said Erin Leigh, the main organizer of an emergency rescue service that has been formed to help pets who could otherwise become casualties of the hardline approach to the virus.
In the past few weeks, Leigh, 33, has expanded her group from a pet-sitting firm to a network of thousands of unpaid volunteers.
The group has found Wang’s fortunate feline a temporary home with a sitter across town.
The relieved financial worker said that her cat “wouldn’t have survived my apartment being disinfected.”
“Her conditions would have been pretty bleak without anyone coming to feed her,” the 28-year-old said.
“For some pets in the city, it comes down to life or death,” said Leigh, adding that owners felt “helpless.”
Across China, local governments’ urgency to stamp out every virus case has pushed animal well-being down the list of authorities’ priorities. In January, Hong Kong culled about 2,000 hamsters after one tested positive for COVID-19, and at least three cats and a dog were among animals killed by health workers in mainland China last year.
After the video of the corgi killing, Leigh said that she has been inundated with pleas from owners “desperate to get their animals saved.”
“People are like: ‘Get my dog to safety. I don’t even want it in my house,’” she said.
Pet ownership in China has ballooned, particularly in cosmopolitan hubs such as Shanghai.
The financial center has been at the heart of China’s worst COVID-19 outbreak since the peak of the first virus wave in Wuhan more than two years ago, and has been under a patchwork of lockdown restrictions since last month which have left most of its 25 million residents confined to their homes.
As Shanghai officials ramped up control measures, Leigh and others mobilized online to share information about the pets left behind when people were taken into centralized quarantine.
A handful of administrators work day and night to record cases of distressed animals, classifying them by location and noting those that most urgently need food, shelter or other care.
The network then raises the alarm on social media, sharing “help needed” posters in both Chinese and English until a savior is found.
They also connect owners and sitters with homebound vets “so they can all help each other in case there are any medical emergencies,” said volunteer Joey Ang, a 20-year-old student from Singapore.
The team has aided hundreds of cats and dogs — plus a few birds, fish and snakes.
Evacuated pets must be steered through the often-baffling lockdown restrictions, sometimes traveling hours to reach short-term homes just a few streets away.
However, the road to freedom is rarely smooth in a city where officials sweat over the potential consequences of bending vaguely defined lockdown rules.
Security guards often get jittery about carrying disinfected crates containing animals into and out of housing compounds, while drivers have jacked up fees for ferrying pets, volunteers said.
Newly married and with his first child on the way, auto worker Wang (王) wanted to move into the apartment he bought in Wuhan three years ago, but those hopes were dashed by China’s ballooning property crisis. Saddled with nearly US$300,000 in debt and with his unit nowhere near completion, the 34-year-old decided he had enough and stopped making mortgage payments. He is among numerous home buyers across dozens of cities in China who have boycotted payments over fears that their properties will not be completed by cash-strapped, debt-laden developers. “They said construction would resume soon,” Wang said, only giving his surname. “But
‘COMMON THREATS’: In a speech marking the end of Japan’s rule over the Korean Peninsula, Yoon Suk-yeol said he wants to ‘swiftly ... improve’ relations with Tokyo South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol on Monday said Japan is a partner as the two countries face “common threats,” offering to improve ties between the allies of the US whose help Washington has sought in putting up a united front against the likes of China, Russia and North Korea. Yoon said in a speech to mark Japan’s World War II surrender and the end of its 1910-1945 colonial rule over the Korean Peninsula that he wants to “swiftly and properly improve” relations with Tokyo stemming from historical disputes. “When Korea-Japan relations move toward a common future, and when the mission of
NATIONAL SECURITY PRIORITY: Former US president Donald Trump might have retained nuclear codes after leaving the White House last year, a weapons expert said FBI agents were looking for secret documents about nuclear weapons among other classified material when they searched former US president Donald Trump’s Florida home on Monday, the Washington Post reported on Thursday. The newspaper cited people familiar with the investigation as saying that nuclear weapons documents were thought to be in the trove the FBI was hunting in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. They did not specify what kind of documents, or whether they referred to the US arsenal or another country’s. The report came hours after US Attorney General Merrick Garland said he had personally authorized the US government request for a search
PLEAS FOR PEACE: After dozens of vehicles had been destroyed, Tijuana’s mayor told gangs the city would ‘take care of its citizens,’ and asked them to leave bystanders alone Hundreds of Mexican military troops were on Saturday flown into Tijuana to beef up street patrols after armed gangs hijacked and burned at least a dozen vehicles in the border city, the latest in a wave of attacks hitting civilians across the country. The US consulate in Tijuana instructed its employees “to shelter in place until further notice” around midnight on Friday because of the violence, as the Tijuana hijackings snarled traffic across the city and temporarily blocked access to one of the world’s busiest border crossings. About 350 national guard troops were flown in to reinforce thousands of federal troops already
RSS