1 yr. ago • 94%

Police in China rescue over 1,000 cats from being slaughtered and sold as mutton, pork

www.straitstimes.com Police in China rescue over 1,000 cats from being slaughtered and sold as mutton, pork

The cat meat would have been passed off as the more expensive mutton or pork in local markets. Read more at straitstimes.com.

94 comments

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

62
- 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.
  
  13
  
  That's where the stolen rats come in...
  
  7
This entire article feels... off...

Was it written by AI? Some propagandist? Did someone pay for this article to be written?

30
- It's a fairly well known and reputable Singaporean newspaper, FWIW
  
  30
- I was feeling the same way, but maybe machine translated rather than machine written?
  
  Looking at a bias site, it looks like they aren't known for just posting nonsense, though I guess this could be anti-Chinese propaganda:
  
  https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-straits-times
  
  16
  
  anti-Chinese
  
  Anti-China *
  
  Straits Times is a Singaporean newspaper, and Singapore is a majority-Chinese country. As a Chinese myself, it stings when people automatically assume I'm a China national. This is pretty similar to Jews having to clarify that Israel does not represent them.
  
  Note that I'm not actually commenting on the article, no idea about its accuracy.
  
  25
- It reads ok in a proper Singlish accent
  
  10
- 100% this.
  
  If using cats as feed animals is illegal, they should reference the laws, and have quotes from the police officers.
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_meat Cat meat is meat. Different cultures have different viewpoints on it. this article should contextualize about the culture the story is from.
  
  9
  
  From the article, the crime is not that they are selling cat meat, but that they're mislabelling it as pork and beef
  
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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

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- 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.
  
  16
  
  this is China.. maybe you don't understand how big China is, and how many people live there.. how many servings of "pork" fried rice get served every day.. or how their law enforcement works.. only the crooks who don't pay the cops enough get caught..
  
  -15
- Why is it worse to eat a cat than to eat a pig?
  
  12
  
  It's not, but if it's being sold as pork it's a problem
  
  20
  
  Cats are friends.
  
  5
  
  Because a pig is smarter and cats are devious minions of satan
  
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  Permanently Deleted
  
  2
  
  It's both bad. So good news the cats were saved.
  
  1
  
  Exactly. The title read to me like "look at those good police saving the cars from being killed for meat". How about the millions of pigs that get slaughtered to be sold as pork meat. We don't care about them?
  
  0
  
  pigs are just asking to be eaten
  
  -8
- 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.
  
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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.

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- I doubt they are farming the cats so much as collecting them from the streets and everywhere else.
  
  19
  
  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.
  
  5
Ah speciesism again...

7
- From the article, the crime is not that they are selling cat meat, but that they're mislabelling it as pork and beef
  
  20
  
  And doing so for profit...
  
  4
  
  I read the title as "saving cats from being slaughtered and sold as [...] meat".. When will police start heroically saving the millions of pigs or cows from being sold as whatever meat?
  
  -1
- 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?
  
  7
  
  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.
  
  28
  
  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.
  
  13
  
  Eating someones pet is different than eating an animal being raised to be eaten. For starters you have to kidnap the pet.
  
  4
- God you guys are insufferable.
  
  -2
So what is the police going to do with the cats now?

4
Reminds me of this song I heard back in the 90s

3
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  1
Permanently Deleted

-2
I'm vegan btw

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