Guest guest Posted March 10, 2008 Report Share Posted March 10, 2008 There are many aspects of this article that I find questionable. From the top: >Olympics clean-up Chinese style: Inside Beijing's >shocking death camp for cats >By SIMON PERRY > >Last updated at 16:23pm on 9th March 2008 > >Thousands of pet cats in Beijing are being abandoned >by their owners and sent to die in secretive >government pounds as China mounts an aggressive drive >to clean up the capital in preparation for the Olympic >Games. Is this what is actually happening? Or, is this actually just an attempted purge of the abundant feral cats in Beijing, little different in any significant detail from the routine catch-and-kill removal of feral cats practiced every day in most major U.S. and European cities? >Hundreds of cats a day are being rounded and crammed >into cages so small they cannot even turn around. Are these cages qualitatively different from the traps used by people who do neuter/return? Cat trapping cages tend to be narrow. This, in itself, is not an atrocity. >Then they are trucked to what animal welfare groups >describe as death camps on the edges of the city. A death camp would be an atrocity; but more about this when we get to the detailed description. >The cull comes in the wake of a government campaign >warning of the diseases cats carry and ordering >residents to help clear the streets of them. Again: what is different about this, if anything, from the routine warnings issued by U.S. and European animal control departments about the risks feral cats may present of spreading cat scratch fever, toxoplasmosis, and occasionally even rabies and bubonic plague? U.S. animal control agencies in various parts of the country have issued warnings of this sort just in the past week. Feral cats are not normally a major disease vector, but at certain times and in certain places, they can present risks--albeit usually much less than the risks associated with an uncontrolled mouse and rat population. >Cat owners, terrified by the disease warning, are >dumping their pets in the streets to be picked up by >special collection teams. This is the second time that author Simon Parry has repeated this allegation, without furnishing evidence for it either time. Mere repetition is not substantiation. >Paranoia is so intense that six stray cats -including >two pregnant females - were beaten to death with >sticks by teachers at a Beijing kindergarten, who >feared they might pass illnesses to the children. Wade Pilloud, principal of the kindergarten-through-12th-grade school in Indus, Minnesota, killed two kittens with a shotgun in September 2006 under closely comparable circumstances. (He resigned after parents protested, and is now principal of a school in Idaho.) Some people in positions of authority at schools are paranoid morons, who occasionally kill cats out of sheet stupidity. However, a single instance of cruelty and stupidity at a school in either Beijing or Minnesota really tells us very little about the general situation in either place. As Marc Bekoff often reminds, " The plural of anecdote is data, " but we don't have a plural here. >China's leaders are convinced that animals pose a >serious urban health risk and may have contributed to >the outbreak of SARS - a deadly respiratory virus - in >2003. Almost every nation in the world is convinced that animals pose a serious urban health risk. That's why mouse traps were invented, and why most cities have animal control departments. The association of cats with SARS -- based mostly on the common misapprehension that civets are in the cat family -- has been floating around for five years now. Some of the most aggressive cat-killing that resulted from it was in Singapore. Is this now discredited belief really resurfacing in Beijing, after Chinese scientists were eventually among the leaders in refuting it? Or are Simon Parry and/or his sources merely engaging in unsubstantiated speculation? Pay close attention to what this actually describes: >Officials say people can adopt animals from the 12 cat >pounds set up around the city, but welfare groups say >they are almost impossible to get inside and believe >few cats survive. > >One cat lovers' group negotiated the release of 30 >pets from one of the compounds in Shahe, north-west >Beijing, but said they were in such a pitiful >condition that half of them died within days of their >release. 1) If cats are being rounded up because they are in fact diseased, it should be no surprise that they are subsequently quarantined and that many die. 2) What this sounds like is a severe outbreak of feline panleukopenia, such as caused the deaths of more than 1,000 animals at the largest animal shelter in Las Vegas exactly one year ago. This description is almost identical to the report of the Humane Society of the U.S. team who intervened to deal with the crisis: > " When we went inside, we saw about 70 cats being kept >in cages stacked one on top of the other in two tiny >rooms. > > " Disease spreads quickly among them and they die >slowly in agony and distress. The government won't >even do the cats the kindness of giving them lethal >injections when they become sick. They just wait for >them to die. The shelter in Las Vegas had not euthanized sick animals in many weeks. The HSUS team euthanized many hundreds. The description may well be of shelter mismanagement, contributing to the deaths and suffering of cats, but the situation is unfortunately not unique. The Las Vegas shelter was the largest to have a similar crisis last year, but others occurred in Indianapolis; St Petersburg, Florida; and Cheyenne. Such situations occur even more frequently in the homes of individuals who try to " rescue " cats by keeping large numbers, without being properly equipped to run a shelter. This sounds like such a case: >Retired doctor Hu Yuan, 80, runs one of the few >remaining refuges for abandoned pets in her ramshackle >home in the ancient Long Tou Jing area of Beijing. > >She shares her tiny home with 250 abandoned cats and >has taken in 70 over the past 12 months alone. I have an idea who this is. I know a person who fits the description. I visited her home in 2003. She is, bluntly speaking, an animal hoarder. Whether conditions for the 250 cats in her care are any better than for the cats in the government facility is at best questionable. Probably both places are hell for the cats kept there. >Cats are regularly dumped on her doorstep late at >night by owners frightened by the government campaign. Animal rescuers everywhere experience this. It doesn't take a government campaign to cause some people to dump their animals--or, as often, the animals of a neighbor or relative whom the dumpers find annoying. > " The situation is very bad now, " said Ms Hu. " When >women get pregnant, the doctor will ask them if they >have a cat in the house. > " If they reply Yes, they tell them, 'You must get rid >of it, it will be bad for the baby'. We are still dealing with this mythology in the U.S., too. But ignorance, superstition, and stupidity are not always government plots, despite the ambitions of some governments (like the George W. Bush administration) to establish monopolies on the basic traits. > " I keep all the cats in my house and 100 of them sleep >in my bedroom at night. Is anyone under the illusion that this is a sanitary situation? >The round-up has been particularly intense in areas >around Olympic venues and in streets and alleys >surrounding five-star hotels where guests will stay >during the summer games. Interestingly enough, I didn't find many feral cats in those areas in 2003, well before the alleged government round-ups -- because those areas had heavy vehicular traffic, covered dumpsters, and frequent garbage removal. Ten blocks away, in older residential neighborhoods, feral cats were abundant, because food sources were abundant. >Despite the health warnings, the round-up of cats has >led to a surge in the number of restaurants in the >capital serving cat meat, according to Ms Hu. Where is the evidence? Various investigations over the past 15-20 years have repeatedly found between 90 and 114 restaurants in Beijing, among more than 14,000 total, serving dog meat. Few if any serving cat meat have ever been verified -- whereas, in the Guangzhou area, they have historically been easily found. >She said hundreds of cats were also being sent to >Guangzhou in southern China, an area infamous for >restaurants that serve meat from cats and dogs and >exotic animals such as snakes and tigers. This is a particularly dubious allegation, since Guangzhou banned dragon-fighting-tiger, the major cat meat dish, in November 2007; and in July 2007, more than 400 cats who were rescued from a truck en route from Shanghai to Guangdong were taken to Beijing for fostering and adoption, in an incident that received very favorable coverage from China Daily. >It was in July last year that district officials were >instructed to begin an intense round-up of cats as >part of Beijing's pre-Olympics clean-up. If this occurred in July 2007, right in the middle of the uproar over dog roundups, why did none of the activists who avidly relayed information about the dog roundups ever make any mention of cats? Why are we only now hearing about this alleged instruction, eight months later? > Now notices have been put up urging residents to hand in cats. Did Simon Parry see such a notice? Did he verify the content? (I well remember a couple of years ago receiving photographs of " canned dog meat " supposedly being sold by a Chinese affiliate of a U.S. grocery store chain. It turned out to be the Chinese version of Pedigree brand dog food.) >Welfare groups estimate that tens of thousands have >been collected in the past few months. 1) What " welfare groups, " based on what information? 2) Tens of thousands of cats have also been collected in the past few months by the animal control agencies serving New York City and Los Angeles--and this is just business as usual. >The Mail on Sunday went to the cat pound in Shahe on >the north-western fringes of Beijing but we were >repeatedly refused admission. > > " No one can come in without official papers, " staff >shouted from behind padlocked steel gates. > >At another, larger compound in Da Niu Fang village, >the sound of cats wailing could be clearly heard >coming from a cluster of tin-roofed sheds, but workers >denied they were holding any cats. > > " There are no cats here, go away. No one is allowed >inside unless you have official permission, " a >security guard said. This sounds bad. It is also similar to what still goes on at far too many U.S. animal control shelters today, & was almost routine 20 years ago. >• Names of the animal campaigners have been changed as >the people we interviewed are concerned about >officials' reaction to our story. I'm not impressed. The most credible animal advocates of Beijing, in my experience of reporting about them over many years, have been remarkably willing to speak out, using their names, on the record, including in criticizing government actions and policies. While the Chinese government has a reputation for often very harshly dealing with dissidents, animal advocates have mostly received favorable media coverage, even when they stormed cat meat restaurants, and the only animal advocates known to have been detained by police were the organizers of an unauthorized rally against the dog policy held last year at the Beijing Zoo--who were released soon afterward. Overall, this story & the allegations in it look to me like a case of adding apples & oranges to get tomatoes. -- Merritt Clifton Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE P.O. Box 960 Clinton, WA 98236 Telephone: 360-579-2505 Fax: 360-579-2575 E-mail: anmlpepl Web: www.animalpeoplenews.org [ANIMAL PEOPLE is the leading independent newspaper providing original investigative coverage of animal protection worldwide, founded in 1992. Our readership of 30,000-plus includes the decision-makers at more than 10,000 animal protection organizations. We have no alignment or affiliation with any other entity. $24/year; for free sample, send address.] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted March 10, 2008 Report Share Posted March 10, 2008 Ha! I agree with u Clifton. I read this article and went to the original Daily Mail report online, and saw other strange things about the report, like a photo of cats in cages labeled ³off to the meat market² (?). There is also a photo of the ³death camp² which just looks like an ordinary Chinese building, no dead cats in sight. I am also pretty sure Simon Perry is a pseudo name, as he does not appear to contribute to any other DM articles of late, while a whole slew of other surnamed Perrys do. I think everyone will have to take reporting on China during Olympic season with a grain of aspirin, as it¹s clearly open season for all opposed to China going from the general down to the specific. Too bad newspaper¹s anti-communist slants still get in the way of useful reporting. Cheers, Jigs Animalnepal.org Merritt Clifton <anmlpepl Mon, 10 Mar 2008 01:22:07 -0800 AAPN List <aapn > Re: Olympics clean-up Chinese style There are many aspects of this article that I find questionable. From the top: >Olympics clean-up Chinese style: Inside Beijing's >shocking death camp for cats >By SIMON PERRY > >Last updated at 16:23pm on 9th March 2008 > >Thousands of pet cats in Beijing are being abandoned >by their owners and sent to die in secretive >government pounds as China mounts an aggressive drive >to clean up the capital in preparation for the Olympic >Games. Is this what is actually happening? Or, is this actually just an attempted purge of the abundant feral cats in Beijing, little different in any significant detail from the routine catch-and-kill removal of feral cats practiced every day in most major U.S. and European cities? >Hundreds of cats a day are being rounded and crammed >into cages so small they cannot even turn around. Are these cages qualitatively different from the traps used by people who do neuter/return? Cat trapping cages tend to be narrow. This, in itself, is not an atrocity. >Then they are trucked to what animal welfare groups >describe as death camps on the edges of the city. A death camp would be an atrocity; but more about this when we get to the detailed description. >The cull comes in the wake of a government campaign >warning of the diseases cats carry and ordering >residents to help clear the streets of them. Again: what is different about this, if anything, from the routine warnings issued by U.S. and European animal control departments about the risks feral cats may present of spreading cat scratch fever, toxoplasmosis, and occasionally even rabies and bubonic plague? U.S. animal control agencies in various parts of the country have issued warnings of this sort just in the past week. Feral cats are not normally a major disease vector, but at certain times and in certain places, they can present risks--albeit usually much less than the risks associated with an uncontrolled mouse and rat population. >Cat owners, terrified by the disease warning, are >dumping their pets in the streets to be picked up by >special collection teams. This is the second time that author Simon Parry has repeated this allegation, without furnishing evidence for it either time. Mere repetition is not substantiation. >Paranoia is so intense that six stray cats -including >two pregnant females - were beaten to death with >sticks by teachers at a Beijing kindergarten, who >feared they might pass illnesses to the children. Wade Pilloud, principal of the kindergarten-through-12th-grade school in Indus, Minnesota, killed two kittens with a shotgun in September 2006 under closely comparable circumstances. (He resigned after parents protested, and is now principal of a school in Idaho.) Some people in positions of authority at schools are paranoid morons, who occasionally kill cats out of sheet stupidity. However, a single instance of cruelty and stupidity at a school in either Beijing or Minnesota really tells us very little about the general situation in either place. As Marc Bekoff often reminds, " The plural of anecdote is data, " but we don't have a plural here. >China's leaders are convinced that animals pose a >serious urban health risk and may have contributed to >the outbreak of SARS - a deadly respiratory virus - in >2003. Almost every nation in the world is convinced that animals pose a serious urban health risk. That's why mouse traps were invented, and why most cities have animal control departments. The association of cats with SARS -- based mostly on the common misapprehension that civets are in the cat family -- has been floating around for five years now. Some of the most aggressive cat-killing that resulted from it was in Singapore. Is this now discredited belief really resurfacing in Beijing, after Chinese scientists were eventually among the leaders in refuting it? Or are Simon Parry and/or his sources merely engaging in unsubstantiated speculation? Pay close attention to what this actually describes: >Officials say people can adopt animals from the 12 cat >pounds set up around the city, but welfare groups say >they are almost impossible to get inside and believe >few cats survive. > >One cat lovers' group negotiated the release of 30 >pets from one of the compounds in Shahe, north-west >Beijing, but said they were in such a pitiful >condition that half of them died within days of their >release. 1) If cats are being rounded up because they are in fact diseased, it should be no surprise that they are subsequently quarantined and that many die. 2) What this sounds like is a severe outbreak of feline panleukopenia, such as caused the deaths of more than 1,000 animals at the largest animal shelter in Las Vegas exactly one year ago. This description is almost identical to the report of the Humane Society of the U.S. team who intervened to deal with the crisis: > " When we went inside, we saw about 70 cats being kept >in cages stacked one on top of the other in two tiny >rooms. > > " Disease spreads quickly among them and they die >slowly in agony and distress. The government won't >even do the cats the kindness of giving them lethal >injections when they become sick. They just wait for >them to die. The shelter in Las Vegas had not euthanized sick animals in many weeks. The HSUS team euthanized many hundreds. The description may well be of shelter mismanagement, contributing to the deaths and suffering of cats, but the situation is unfortunately not unique. The Las Vegas shelter was the largest to have a similar crisis last year, but others occurred in Indianapolis; St Petersburg, Florida; and Cheyenne. Such situations occur even more frequently in the homes of individuals who try to " rescue " cats by keeping large numbers, without being properly equipped to run a shelter. This sounds like such a case: >Retired doctor Hu Yuan, 80, runs one of the few >remaining refuges for abandoned pets in her ramshackle >home in the ancient Long Tou Jing area of Beijing. > >She shares her tiny home with 250 abandoned cats and >has taken in 70 over the past 12 months alone. I have an idea who this is. I know a person who fits the description. I visited her home in 2003. She is, bluntly speaking, an animal hoarder. Whether conditions for the 250 cats in her care are any better than for the cats in the government facility is at best questionable. Probably both places are hell for the cats kept there. >Cats are regularly dumped on her doorstep late at >night by owners frightened by the government campaign. Animal rescuers everywhere experience this. It doesn't take a government campaign to cause some people to dump their animals--or, as often, the animals of a neighbor or relative whom the dumpers find annoying. > " The situation is very bad now, " said Ms Hu. " When >women get pregnant, the doctor will ask them if they >have a cat in the house. > " If they reply Yes, they tell them, 'You must get rid >of it, it will be bad for the baby'. We are still dealing with this mythology in the U.S., too. But ignorance, superstition, and stupidity are not always government plots, despite the ambitions of some governments (like the George W. Bush administration) to establish monopolies on the basic traits. > " I keep all the cats in my house and 100 of them sleep >in my bedroom at night. Is anyone under the illusion that this is a sanitary situation? >The round-up has been particularly intense in areas >around Olympic venues and in streets and alleys >surrounding five-star hotels where guests will stay >during the summer games. Interestingly enough, I didn't find many feral cats in those areas in 2003, well before the alleged government round-ups -- because those areas had heavy vehicular traffic, covered dumpsters, and frequent garbage removal. Ten blocks away, in older residential neighborhoods, feral cats were abundant, because food sources were abundant. >Despite the health warnings, the round-up of cats has >led to a surge in the number of restaurants in the >capital serving cat meat, according to Ms Hu. Where is the evidence? Various investigations over the past 15-20 years have repeatedly found between 90 and 114 restaurants in Beijing, among more than 14,000 total, serving dog meat. Few if any serving cat meat have ever been verified -- whereas, in the Guangzhou area, they have historically been easily found. >She said hundreds of cats were also being sent to >Guangzhou in southern China, an area infamous for >restaurants that serve meat from cats and dogs and >exotic animals such as snakes and tigers. This is a particularly dubious allegation, since Guangzhou banned dragon-fighting-tiger, the major cat meat dish, in November 2007; and in July 2007, more than 400 cats who were rescued from a truck en route from Shanghai to Guangdong were taken to Beijing for fostering and adoption, in an incident that received very favorable coverage from China Daily. >It was in July last year that district officials were >instructed to begin an intense round-up of cats as >part of Beijing's pre-Olympics clean-up. If this occurred in July 2007, right in the middle of the uproar over dog roundups, why did none of the activists who avidly relayed information about the dog roundups ever make any mention of cats? Why are we only now hearing about this alleged instruction, eight months later? > Now notices have been put up urging residents to hand in cats. Did Simon Parry see such a notice? Did he verify the content? (I well remember a couple of years ago receiving photographs of " canned dog meat " supposedly being sold by a Chinese affiliate of a U.S. grocery store chain. It turned out to be the Chinese version of Pedigree brand dog food.) >Welfare groups estimate that tens of thousands have >been collected in the past few months. 1) What " welfare groups, " based on what information? 2) Tens of thousands of cats have also been collected in the past few months by the animal control agencies serving New York City and Los Angeles--and this is just business as usual. >The Mail on Sunday went to the cat pound in Shahe on >the north-western fringes of Beijing but we were >repeatedly refused admission. > > " No one can come in without official papers, " staff >shouted from behind padlocked steel gates. > >At another, larger compound in Da Niu Fang village, >the sound of cats wailing could be clearly heard >coming from a cluster of tin-roofed sheds, but workers >denied they were holding any cats. > > " There are no cats here, go away. No one is allowed >inside unless you have official permission, " a >security guard said. This sounds bad. It is also similar to what still goes on at far too many U.S. animal control shelters today, & was almost routine 20 years ago. >• Names of the animal campaigners have been changed as >the people we interviewed are concerned about >officials' reaction to our story. I'm not impressed. The most credible animal advocates of Beijing, in my experience of reporting about them over many years, have been remarkably willing to speak out, using their names, on the record, including in criticizing government actions and policies. While the Chinese government has a reputation for often very harshly dealing with dissidents, animal advocates have mostly received favorable media coverage, even when they stormed cat meat restaurants, and the only animal advocates known to have been detained by police were the organizers of an unauthorized rally against the dog policy held last year at the Beijing Zoo--who were released soon afterward. Overall, this story & the allegations in it look to me like a case of adding apples & oranges to get tomatoes. -- Merritt Clifton Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE P.O. Box 960 Clinton, WA 98236 Telephone: 360-579-2505 Fax: 360-579-2575 E-mail: anmlpepl <anmlpepl%40whidbey.com> Web: www.animalpeoplenews.org [ANIMAL PEOPLE is the leading independent newspaper providing original investigative coverage of animal protection worldwide, founded in 1992. Our readership of 30,000-plus includes the decision-makers at more than 10,000 animal protection organizations. We have no alignment or affiliation with any other entity. $24/year; for free sample, send address.] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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