Chinese seek to pull cats from the menu

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.