A Chinese Gang Used Sparrows to Catch Cats for Meat Trade

Hardly anyone in China eats cats, except for a small minority in the southern provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi. But the meat trade remains lucrative enough that some across the country are going to extreme lengths to capture felines, including domestic pets. 

A gang in the eastern city of Jinan in Shandong province placed chirping sparrows inside cages as bait and used an electronic remote control to shut the traps as soon as a cat entered. 

Animal rights activists worked with local police and busted their operation last week, rescuing 148 cats that were crammed inside seven rusty cages. 

“We had been tracking this gang of cat thieves and traders for a while and finally found the place they stored all the cats they stole from the streets,” said Huang, a member of the Chinese animal protection group, Vshine, in a statement. He only provided his last name. “It was shocking to see the state they were in, many of them emaciated and crying out.”

Activists also found 31 sparrows at the scene, most of which survived and were released back into the wild. The rescued cats have been transferred to shelters, which have appealed to owners of missing cats to visit to check for their pets. Some came in tears in hope of a possible reunion.

Peter Li, a China policy specialist at the animal charity Humane Society International, said the criminals were targeting cats that roamed in the neighborhoods and were cared for by the communities. “Unlike neglected and hungry street cats who can be caught with fish or meat, these cats are well fed but would have been attracted by the flapping birds,” Li said.

The gang also fitted cages to their fleets of motorcycles to transport the cats to holding depots and eventually to markets and slaughterhouses in southern China, where they would be sold as meat.

While China has banned the trade and consumption of wildlife since the COVID pandemic began, it does not have a nationwide law against animal cruelty. The gang was instead arrested for the possession of sparrows, which are a protected species in the country, and alleged property theft, as some residents have identified their stolen pets among the rescued cats.

Animal rights groups have repeatedly called for animal welfare legislation in China in order to root out meat trade and animal abuse. “In countries with good animal protection laws, society sets a standard for how animals should be treated, and legal disincentives for deviating from that standard. In the absence of that, it is all too easy to treat animals in ways that totally overlook or ignore their capacity to suffer,” Wendy Higgins of HSI told VICE World News. She hopes that other Chinese cities would follow the examples of Shenzhen and Zhuhai, which banned the consumption of dog and cat meat in 2020.

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