In most of the country, eating felines is considered disgusting, but not in Guangdong. So the battle begins.
By Barbara Demick
10:03 PM PST, December 22, 2008
Reporting from Guangzhou, China --

The gray tabby cat with hazel eyes and a white nose scrunched at the bottom of a stack of metal cages filled with rabbits, quail, pigeons and ducks, across the aisle from the buckets of turtles and scorpions in a narrow shop with as many live animals as a petting zoo.

If it was male or female, young or old, nobody seemed to know or care. All that mattered was its weight, 6 1/2 pounds.

After a few quick calculations, the shopkeeper offered to sell the cat for $1.32 per pound, about $9.

"We'll cut it up right here in back for you," the shopkeeper suggested, gesturing toward a bloodstained room.

The scene is routine at butcher shops in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, formerly known as Canton.

Although Cantonese cooking is known abroad for dim sum and won-ton soup, it is also recognized as the most exotic of the Chinese cuisines, serving up a veritable Noah's ark of species on the dinner plate. As a popular saying goes, the Cantonese will eat anything that walks, crawls, hops or flies.

But now fellow Chinese are drawing the line. Eating cat, they say -- that is just too disgusting.

"Cats are your friends, not food," read the banners carried at a demonstration last week at the Guangzhou train station, where protesters were trying to intercept a shipment of cats.

"Shame on Guangdong!" they chanted at another demonstration, held at the Beijing offices of the Guangdong provincial government.

Dog is eaten in many parts of China, but only in Guangdong do people eat cat. It is rare to see a stray wandering the streets. Many cats served for supper here are shipped down from the north.

The Small Animal Protection Assn. says one Guangzhou-based business captures up to 10,000 cats per day from different parts of China. The cat snatchers are typically formerly unemployed people who use large fishing nets and are paid $1.50 per cat.

"They've eaten all their cats so they have to take ours from Beijing. People don't want to let their cats go out on the street," said Zhao Ming, a 55-year-old physician who was among about 40 people demonstrating in Beijing.

The cat trade thrives in a seemingly boundless gray area of commerce. Police are reluctant to charge the cat catchers with theft because many of the cats involved live outside and, in the famously independent way of cats, are not technically owned by humans, merely fed and nurtured.

In the absence of police action, cat lovers are increasingly taking matters into their own hands.

When Shanghai activists got a tip in August that a truckload of cats was passing nearby on its way to Guangdong, they staged an ambush. About 11 p.m., they confronted the truck at a market, where the driver had stopped to rest, and tried to buy the cats.

When the driver refused, a standoff dragged on until the next afternoon. While some activists argued with the driver and police, others opened the back of the truck and released about 1,600 cats. About 300 cats were found dead.

Many of the rescue efforts are directed by Lu Di, a nearly 80-year-old woman who used to work for Mao Tse-tung, reading to the Chinese leader in his final years when his eyesight was poor.

"You can judge how advanced a civilization is by the way it treats its animals," said Lu, paraphrasing Gandhi. She founded the Small Animal Protection Assn., which she runs out of the Beijing apartment she shares with 15 cats, more than a dozen dogs, a quail, a pigeon and a monkey.

She picked up one cat with a fresh red scar running around its body caused by a wire that dealers wrap around cats to keep them from running away. Often, the cats are badly mistreated in their final moments, crammed as tightly as tomatoes into crates so they can't breathe, and clubbed into semiconsciousness before being thrown alive into boiling water.

"This is a crime that humiliates all Chinese people," Lu said.

Cats peer from a cage after being saved from a market in Beijing. The Small Animal Protection Assn. says one business in Guangzhou, where cats are eaten, captures up to 10,000 a day — including pets — from around China and brings them back to be sold as food.