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.
Eating cats clearly has become socially unacceptable for many Chinese. When the Guangzhou-based newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily published an expose this month on a cat-snatching operation, it set off last week's demonstrations.
Chinese websites were filled with outrage.
"Guangdong people are the most unprincipled of the human species!" wrote one person. "They would eat their mothers-in-law if there was no law."
The dispute over eating cat cuts across the fault lines of Chinese society. Among the increasingly Westernized middle class, there is a fast-growing culture of cat fanciers who like them for cuddling, not eating. Restrictions on the size and number of dogs one can have as pets make cats popular pets in the city.
Inside Beijing's largest shopping mall, a dozen pampered felines recently lounged inside a huge display case of a pet store specializing in cats. Well-heeled shoppers strolled by oohing and aahing through the glass.
