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…
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It’s a fairly well known and reputable Singaporean newspaper, FWIW
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:
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.
I’m trying to get your point. But a jew indicates a person of Jewish religion. In most dictionaries “Chinese” will mean “someone or something from China”. I don’t know what the word meant before the nation China arose or if there are ethnic meanings to it, but words mean what people understand them to mean, that’s language, so Chinese kinda means “from China” today. That’s why America now kinda means the country and democracy means republic or other form of majority-rule representative democracy 🤷 (the two lost words I miss the most)
In most dictionaries “Chinese” will mean “someone or something from China”.
You’re not wrong, and there’s the problem. There are around 50M people of Chinese ethnicity living outside of China. Most of us were born and raised outside of China, and have little to no actual connection to the nation. In many cases our families migrated away from China generations ago. Unfortunately, China is all too happy to claim all Chinese people worldwide as a monolithic culture and suppress whatever bits and pieces they don’t agree with. In the same way that Israel uses their reputation as THE Jewish country for political points, so does China.
Me, I’m not a nation-state, so the best I can do is raise a tiny bit of awareness wherever I go, that just because I’m ethnic Chinese, does not mean that I love Pooh Bear (well I do love the original one, but that’s a different story). Hence I’ll happily spend time explaining to new acquaintances that yes, I’m Chinese. But no, I’m not from China. Maybe one day the dictionary definitions will change. shrug
It’s dangerous to confuse a national identity with an ethnic one. But I grant you, it’s nations who are at fault with claiming the terms and other ones by acknowledging them.
But aside from that (and I just wonder), is there such a thing as a Chinese ethnicity? I always imagined China was pretty diverse, ethnic-wise. With the northern mountain people, the coastal people the western people (I don’t know names or terms) being quite different from one another… Is that not true?
I always imagined China was pretty diverse, ethnic-wise. With the northern mountain people, the coastal people the western people (I don’t know names or terms) being quite different from one another
You’re correct, but think of it in the sense of ‘Caucasians’. You can break them down into subgroups that largely correlate to specific geographical regions, but as a group they’re still pretty distinct and recognisable. Of course, things like this tend to get fuzzy around the edges, but that’s biology for you.
I think there’s a super group Chinese people are part of like caucasians, I don’t remember the exact term
Yes, its totally unreasonable for people to conclude that a person who self-identifies as “Chinese” is from China.
It actually is. There’s about 50M Chinese people worldwide who AREN’T from China. That’s a pretty significant number. Even moreso online, since the majority of people in China have no access to social media like this. In my part of the world, citizens of China are referred to as ‘Mainland Chinese’ or ‘Chinese nationals’. Chinese in itself is an ethnicity, and it would be nice if we could get that distinction more widely recognised so the CCP would stop using us as political pieces.
I get how colloquially “Chinese” may refer to those being ethnically Chinese. However, for ppl who aren’t from the Asian region, “Chinese” means “Mainland Chinese”. Imagine if Barack Obama said “I’m African”. He’s ethnically African, who is American, which is called “African American”, (which is specific to descendents of slaves, as their exact point of origin in Africa was lost unfortunately).
Anyways, the point is, perhaps referring to urself as “ethnically Chinese” when communicating with the international community would avoid a lot of confusion.
perhaps referring to urself as “ethnically Chinese” when communicating with the international community would avoid a lot of confusion.
I do make the distinction when it’s relevant, as I did in this case. The original point was to point out the difference between anti-Chinese and anti-China. That’s a pretty significant difference, similar to anti-Israel vs anti-Semitic. Particularly in this case, where the source itself is from an ethnically-Chinese newspaper.
Ahh… Sorry, if I missed that. Just a lil tired today…
It reads ok in a proper Singlish accent
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…
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?
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.
Indian city cows grow for free too
Eating someones pet is different than eating an animal being raised to be eaten. For starters you have to kidnap the pet.
how is it different? They all have the same capacity to suffer. They’re all living, breathing beings. They all experience pain and suffering. How’s it different?
They all have the same capacity to suffer.
why should that matter?
Because appealing to and manipulating your emotions is the only way that fella can alter your behavior in the way they see fit.
They don’t approve of your autonomy.
what about the autonomy of the animals we keep locked up on farms?
Well I just talked with a farm chicken and they seemed okay with it. Have you bothered to ask these animals how they feel about it or are you just projecting your own values onto them?
Spoken like a sociopath.
In this case we’re talking literal stolen pets though.
The animal kidnapping. It directly hurts the owner. A farmer doesn’t really get sad when the lambs go to slaughter.
Right ? I should be allowed to abuse and manipule people freely if I label them as “Slave” !
comparing slaves to animals is what slavers do.
Okay. That’s just a really bad argument. Stealling someones cat and killing the cat is bad. You directly hurt the owner and the animal.
God you guys are insufferable.
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.
So what is the police going to do with the cats now?
Reminds me of this song I heard back in the 90s
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
[https://piped.video/watch?v=UUl2MNHVUjo]](https://piped.video/watch?v=UUl2MNHVUjo])
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I’m vegan btw
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