Death Camps for Kitties

Here is one more reason to avoid Beijing and the Olympics. The Chinese government is charging exorbitant fees for neutering and registration of pet cats, which is required by law, and then blamed the animals falsely for spreading SARS. The result is that cat owners in Beijing have had to dump their cats on the streets.

Teams of communist workers are going around collecting the cats for extermination and to include the excess meat in yummy Olympic Pies.

From the DailyMail here:

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.

Hundreds of cats a day are being rounded and crammed into cages so small they cannot even turn around. Then they are trucked to what animal welfare groups describe as death camps on the edges of the city.
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. Cat owners, terrified by the disease warning, are dumping their pets in the streets to be picked up by special collection teams.

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.

The round-up of cats has led to a surge in the number of restaurants in the capital serving cat meat.

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.

The kindergarten – where staff at a Beijing cigarette factory leave their children – is the most striking illustration of the city-wide fear of cats.

A teacher at the nursery said: “We did it out of love for the children. We were worried the cats might harm them. These six cats had been hanging around the kindergarten looking for food.

“So three male teachers put out plates of tuna in cages for bait, trapped the cats and then beat them to death with sticks.”

Why is it that Chinese people are always beating animals with sticks?