Originally published at: Cat meat crackdown in Zhangjiagang | Boing Boing
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I still don’t see how the economics would make it worthwhile except in near-starvation conditions where meat is in short supply. Convincingly disguising one meat as another isn’t easy and the economics of scale make it almost impossible to raise a pound of cat meat for less than it costs to raise a pound of pig meat.
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This story only bolsters racist stereotypes.
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The implication is that the cats were abducted from the streets.
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The cats in the story were spared that fate, so I feel slightly less bad posting this:
a student discovered a rat’s head in his meal. School authorities initially tried to claim that it was duck meat before admitting that the student was right.
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I can’t imagine it would taste very good. Most predator meet is very gamey. That is why no one eats wolves or coyotes.
As you said, it is expensive to raise predators compared to herbivores. But if they are just getting strays off the street, I guess it’s free? But also unless someone has a very specific appetite for it, I can’t imagine choosing it over pork or chicken. Though maybe they aren’t telling their customers.
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Indeed, this story sounds less like cat-meat, and more like bullshit.
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Even so rounding up, transporting and butchering all those cats seems like it would be a labor-intensive business model.
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As someone else observed, these are likely strays (or at least outdoor pets that can be grabbed), so they aren’t paying the costs of raising and feeding the cats. Obviously someone just thought to themselves “Look at all those cats just running around; that’s like FREE MONEY!”
That said, the economics are probably not compelling. Even when the raw materials come free, harvesting, transportation and preparation all require time and effort, and the sale value of a few pounds of cat-meat must be tiny. It’s a pretty marginal way of making a living.
My partner writes about labor exploitation, including human trafficking. A lot of the trafficking schemes that she looks at turn out to be complicated, risky, demanding and, of course, highly illegal, yet the payoffs are tiny. You could invest the same amount of energy and capital into almost any other business and make far more money.
From which we’ve tentatively concluded that for some people, the exploitation is the point. There’s something about abusing other people for profit – even if the profit is minimal – that scratches some particular itch they have.
So maybe the same thing’s happening here; even if selling cat meat is a terrible way to make a yuan, the people involved are so hypnotized by the idea that they’re conjuring money out of thin air and putting something over on someone that they never stop to look at the actual economics.
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Look at that! The US is on the cusp of war with China and here come the stories about people eating pets.
That train is always on time innit!
I don’t know what the hell is going down in Guangdong but animal cruelty and killings aren’t exclusive to China and illegal meat is a symptom of regulatory corruption and desperation most of the places it crops up. But sure let’s trot this shit out again so we can dehumanize a billion and a half people in this world.
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Sees a bunch of stray cats all over the place:
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I personally don’t have any moral issues with people eating cats: if people can eat cows, chickens, and pigs, why should dogs and cats have a special ‘non food’ privilege just because people like to keep them as pets?
In this case though, it’s false advertising, plus the likelihood that the cats themselves were illegally harvested, etc.
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The original news story comes from the Chinese publication The Paper, which is owned by the Shanghai United Media Group, a State media company of the People’s Republic of China. I’m sure that they have all kinds of ulterior motives for everything they do but it seems unlikely that they cooked up this story specifically to make China look bad on the world stage.
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Herding them is so difficult.
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My SIL used to raise a bunch of guinea pigs, and was interested in learning how to dress, clean, and cook them, since they were originally domesticated in South America as a food source. She got banned from an online forum for guinea pig owners when she started asking questions about it.
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I’d say one of the problems for starters, is if they’re skirting the law with what form of meat, they’re probably skirting the law with other things like proper care and hygiene for food animals.
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I’m not saying they cooked it up. I’m saying blogs pick a story like this and amplify it which has an effect.
Kinda like in China they report about how we all just enjoy murdering our children in school because we’re evil and corrupted, etc.
This is still is what it is. Wherever the source.
Funny how people can see it when it is right wing propaganda like when the spin about fentanyl at the border goes either way depending on who is reporting the story. The story isn’t a lie, the fentanyl is real, the propaganda comes from our own unexamined biases and tendency to amplify hate. I’m not calling out the Chinese press for reporting on local crime, I’m calling out Americans and Europeans for focusing on a story that bolsters racism and hate.
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Possibly just looking down on the rural yokels, we have plenty of that in the rural/urban divide in the US as well.
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