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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.
That's where the stolen rats come in...
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.
Why is it worse to eat a cat than to eat a pig?
It's not, but if it's being sold as pork it's a problem
Because a pig is smarter and cats are devious minions of satan
I mean I'd eat cat if you just labeled it cat.
What i don't understand is how any meat can be passed off as both pork AND mutton, two very different types of meat.
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.
They probably also get their children to do it and the cost of meat there is probably a good bit more expensive compared to income than somewhere like the US.
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
And doing so for profit...
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.
I lived in a few places in China for a year. This is either new, or completely fake. If cats and dogs were sold/eaten for food they would be in the market next to the turtles, above the fish tanks, and under the pigeons. Not a joke.
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.
But cat is cheaper. It grows for free in the city.
The cow is perfect if you're running a farm.
A cat is perfect if you're trying to save some money on meat and you don't have to raise it, just catch it
Eating someones pet is different than eating an animal being raised to be eaten. For starters you have to kidnap the pet.
So what is the police going to do with the cats now?
Reminds me of this song I heard back in the 90s