(CN) Sterilization can solve pet problems: expert

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Sterilization can solve pet problems: expert

By Xie Ying

Global Times

August 26 2009

 

Diu Diu was 2 months old when Li first saw him. He was curled up in the corner

of a cage, mewing, with dirty and disheveled fur. Someone had picked the kitten

up from the side of the road and taken him to a nearby vet.

 

Diu Diu's future appeared bleak at best. A house cat might live about 15 years,

but a stray lasts about three, People's Daily reported in 2005.

 

Yet Diu Diu had one secret weapon of survival: When he looked at Li with

'Shrek-like' eyes, the 27-year-old white-collar worker melted.

 

Today, Li Yan no longer lives alone. A new member has joined his family.

 

'He hid under the sofa at the beginning,' Li said, 'but he soon got familiar

with me a day later.'

 

In two months, Diu Diu has evolved 'from a nervous stranger to a confident

family member'.

 

Such a familiar tale to Westerners would have been extremely odd in China of 30

years ago. George HW Bush told the Guangzhou-based Southern Weekend in July this

year that when he visited Beijing in the 1970s, he seldom saw a dog or cat on

the streets. Someone even mistook his dog for a cat.

 

The number of cats in China increased nearly 500 percent between 1999 and 2007,

according to London-based research company Euromonitor. Along with this figure

comes a growing number of strays, making Diu Diu just one of reportedly hundreds

of thousands of stray cats in Beijing. About 80 percent are abandoned pets,

according to the People's Daily article.

 

Chinese people remain in a 'primitive stage' of keeping companion animals, said

Liao Yumin, director of the rescue department at the Association of Small Animal

Protection in Beijing.

 

Too many people treat companion animals like 'toys', he claimed. Faced with a

problem like cat pregnancy, moving house or migrating to other cities, they

often abandon their tamed, dependent animals to an early death without a second

thought.

 

'Honestly I was not being impulsive adopting Diu Diu,' Li said, 'but many people

fail to consider carefully about keeping a pet. They don't understand a pet is

for life.'

 

Breeding is a growing problem. Mentioning 3-week-old Xiao Hei who faded fast

with diarrhea, Meng Guoying, 30, fell silent a moment.

 

'People are usually reluctant to sterilize their cats,' she said, 'but when

these cats have kittens, they abandon them because it's too difficult keeping

them all.'

 

Meng was walking beside a river after work on a rainy day a year ago. A dark

shape scared her. She found a newborn black kitten, lying on the grass,

trembling at her approach.

 

Meng took the kitten home only to find it would not eat. Two weeks later, Xiao

Hei died.

 

'It's just so callous to abandon a newborn kitten that had not been weaned,'

Meng said.

 

'Cats multiply quickly,' Liao told the Global Times. There are more than 200,000

stray cats in the suburbs of Beijing and that number is spiraling out of

control, according to Liao.

 

A female cat generally breeds three times a year - three or five kittens each

time - meaning cats can multiply in a geometrical manner, Liao said. Unfettered,

a pair of cats can produce more than 100,000 kittens within seven years,

according to People's Daily.

 

Increasing numbers of strays breed dissatisfaction and worry among older Chinese

people who, lacking experience, are uncomfortable around small animals. Meng

admitted even her roommates opposed her adoption of stray cats because they were

'afraid of cats' and saw strays as 'smelly'.

 

�Stray cats easily catch diseases,� said Tian Yu, 29. �How can we prevent

these viruses infecting people?�

 

�The stray cats in my neighborhood often scrape out rubbish from the bins and

make the community dirty,� said 51-year-old Liu Jilong.

 

�Besides, they often screech all night.�

 

Far more vicious attitudes are not hard to find in a nation that still has no

law protecting small animals.

 

News and pictures of cats being trodden on, beaten, burned, skinned or even

boiled alive emerge one after another on the Internet, arousing shame, anger and

controversy and debate between old and modern, rural and urban attitudes.

 

Du Ying has rescued and adopted 10 stray cats. Five were sick or had been

ill-treated. Tiao Tiao, for example, uses three legs to jump. A front leg was

broken when Du found her by the road with another 6-7 centimeter wound bleeding

from her back leg.

 

Duo Duo was being kicked around like a football by workers in a garage. �I

persuaded them to stop, but they threatened to kill the cat,� Du said.

 

Caked with mud and engine oil all over her body including the ears, Duo Duo's

fur was so matted it was only a big cleaning later that Du realized she had

actually rescued a white cat.

 

Most miserable of all was Dou Bai. When Du found Dou Bai, his tail had been

mutilated. They tried to save it, but he lost the tail. Burnt by gasoline,

scarred all over, the tail damage today continues to cause Dou Bai excretory

difficulties.

 

One volunteer found she simply could not take it anymore. Wang Pei jumped to her

death from an 11th-story apartment on November 8, 2005.

 

Three days before her death, Wu Tianyu, leader of Animal Rescue Beijing, told

Henan-based Dahe Daily, Wang �turned pale from anger�.

 

She had been watching videos of farm animal abuse at a meat product security

forum. After participants had concluded China was a long way from ever

establishing a law protecting animals, Wu said she turned �very gloomy�.

 

Wang, China representative for Compassion in World Farming, a UK-based animal

welfare charity, reportedly found �she could no longer tolerate animal

cruelty.�

 

Liao said he too feels �helpless� sometimes about the situation of animals

here.

 

�People often call us when they see cats or dogs being abused, but we can do

nothing but go there and try to persuade those involved to stop it.

 

�As a non-governmental organization, we have no power to legally stop them and

worst of all is that China has no law concerning protection of companion or

small animals.�

 

Old habits die hard

 

Torturing and cruelty toward animals has been routine for a long time on the

mainland, hindering hopes of new legislation, a researcher at the Center for

Science, Technology and Society in Tsinghua University, Beijing, told the

Henan-based paper.

 

Chinese have ignored animal welfare for so long that it seems unlikely attitudes

could be adjusted overnight, Jiang Jingsong of the Center for Science,

Technology and Society at Tsinghua University told the Henan-based paper.

 

With no law preventing abuse, cruelty or killing of animals, Liao and his

organization focus instead on education of humans. Every spring, Labor Day and

National Day, they organize activities to teach people how to look after animals

scientifically and protect them outside. They now have volunteers in 3,000

Beijing communities. In Beijing alone, there are reportedly more than 10,000

individuals or volunteers striving for animal protection. They cannot of course

save all the strays.

 

Those strays that remain often fall victim to the city's periodic purges and

where the animals are taken and how they are killed is an emerging focus for

debate in both media and society.

 

Liao strongly opposes killing stray animals to control their numbers.

 

�Humans have no right to make animals pay for their faults,� he told the

Global Times.

 

To his mind, the obvious answer is mass sterilization. The association offers

free sterilization to 1,200 stray cats a month and the number of vets offering

this service has expanded from 39 three years ago to 100 today.

 

They have sterilized 24,000 cats and by adopting these methods, stray numbers in

eight urban areas have been successfully controlled.

 

Although a passive minority of Chinese mainland animal lovers still question

whether it is kind to neuter cats, the international practice of sterilization

is gradually becoming accepted as the most scientific and compassionate way of

managing companion animal numbers.

 

Meng plans to sterilize her second adopted cat after it had five kittens.

 

Having no space or money to afford the kittens, Meng now has to search for

qualified adopters.

 

�Sterilization is good to both the animal and the people,� she said.

Research by the University of California cited in People's Daily found

sterilization has no negative effect on cats, enhancing their health and

extending their life span.

 

Considering the residential space and economic burden, Liao does not encourage

individuals to adopt strays. This approach, while full of good intentions,

barely scratches the surface of the problem.

 

�We have set up volunteer groups in each community to encourage residents in

the community to keep their sterilized stray cats together and give the animals

a free space to live in.�

 

Happy colonies

 

Combined with a trap-and-release mass sterilization plan, this approach is

gaining gradual acceptance and even popularity in modern Chinese urban society.

Meng said her landlady offers leftovers to the stray cats in her community every

day. So does Du's father, who regularly feeds the 20-30 stray cats in his

community. Li also told the Global Times that he often sees five or six stray

cats playing in his community. �They are all big and fat and even have their

own territories. It seems that they are enjoying their life,� Li said.

 

Besides communities, schools and some scenic spots are also an ideal place for a

colony of stray cats, provided their numbers can be controlled.

 

A net user wrote in his blog at kaixin001 website that the Badachu Park has

become a paradise for 20-30 stray cats. They sleep on the park benches, play on

the grass and eat the food people hand them. Some love to take photos, others

follow visitors and some even try to drive visitors away from their beds: the

benches.

 

�We need to know about the aptitude of a stray cat when rescuing it,� Liao

said, �It's better to keep those with poor survival skills at home and return

those with strong fertility to the wild after sterilization.�

 

�The ultimate objective of rescuing animals is to enable animals and humans to

live together in harmony.�

 

Too early to protect cats from random cruelty

 

Animal lovers of China have been pleading for anti-cruelty legislation since

1992, to no avail.

 

Perhaps the closest was a Beijing draft animal health regulation containing a

sentence about �animal welfare� that was posted on the city government

website for public suggestions on May 8, 2005. It disappeared within two days.

The draft was reportedly �too early� for China.

 

National People's Congress representative Zhou Ping also proposed a national

animal welfare law in 2006. The proposal �got nowhere�, she told the

Economist.

 

China's first animal protection law research center was established in Northwest

University of Politics and Law in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, on December 20, 2008.

On the same day, legal experts and animal researchers set up a team to draft

China's first animal protection law.

 

The first draft was finished in June and will open to public suggestions at the

end of this year. The draft covers all vertebrate animals and for the first time

emphasizes the concept of �animal welfare� in accord with international

norms and proposes punishment for those who abandon or abuse animals, according

to Chang Jiwen, chief researcher of the drafting team.

 

However, the draft is just a consultation paper for the reference of Chinese

legislative bodies. �This is not real legislation but a non-governmental

activity to promote animal protection legislation,� Chang said.

 

While there is still no law protecting these animals or strays, there are city

regulations controlling their numbers. Beijing's 2005 Management Method on

Animals Shelter stipulates that animal epidemic prevention agencies bear the

responsibility for stray cats but not dogs.

 

An owner must claim their lost cat within 10 days. If that cat is not adopted

within 15 days, the animal is killed by means unspecified.

 

Source: Agencies

 

http://special.globaltimes.cn/2009-08/461516_4.html