(CN) Boiling-alive
Posted by: "Dr John Wedderburn"
john@aapn.org
Thu Aug 2, 2007 8:33 pm (PST)
From: William Tung
Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2007 12:21 AM
"Boiling-alive" and bludgeoning are adopted by restaurants in China
Guangzhou as means of slaughtering cats for consumption. Chefs at
these restaurants even claim that the more the cat suffers, the
better its meat will taste.
A dossier provided by Zhou Yu (alias) of the Guangzhou Cat-lovers
Net (Association) gives a listing of restaurants which are
notorious for serving cat meat dishes. Well-known restaurants in
Guangzhou are found on the list,
including a culinary establishment infamous for dishing out snake
meat mixed with feline meat.
The dish of snake meat mixed with feline meat has long been a
delicacy on the menu of this culinary establishment. The price
varies significantly depending on the ingredients used. The
restaurant manager reveals that the cats used for cooking are all
imported from abroad and the restaurant's merchandiser regularly
visits the Guangzhou wholesale market to replenish supply.
Ouyang Xiang-mei, former executive chef from a restaurant in Panyu,
Guangzhou, says that "boiling-alive" and bludgeoning of cats are
common practice to ensure the freshness of the meat.
Ouyang continues to exemplify that the longer the torturing of the
cat lasts, the blood will be fully infused within the meat and so
the better it will taste.
This restaurant that specializes in cat meat dishes is located deep
in an alleyway to the right of Lian Road in Panyu, sheltered by a
large number of densely-erected industrial sheds. There are no
signs indicating its existence and it has been in this business for
already seven years.
To prove that they do provide live cats on their menu, the
restaurants usually ask the customers make their selections from
the cats' pound.
Whenever the chef enters the pound to pick out the chosen cat,
haunting cries immediately fill the whole pound.
The chef uses a clamp with his left hand to take hold of the neck
of the cat and then whacks its head with a half-metre long steel
bar using his right hand. Despite the ferocious struggle by the
traumatized animal, the chef throws it onto the floor and continues
with beating the head.
The struggle gradually subsides. The chef tosses the barely alive
animal into a red bucket. He is quite wary that the cat is kept
from being
bludgeoned to death outright since it cannot be "boiled-alive"
otherwise.
With its life withering, the animal is taken to the "processing
area" to the west of the cats' pound. It continues to wriggle but
its cry is getting weaker, indicating that its end is fast
approaching.
As the kitchen helpers quickly transfer the cat from the red bucket
into a pan of boiling water, the animal lets out a last spate of
screaming. When all the cooking is done, the cat is finally
skinned, sliced and then served.
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Tortured cats won't make you more virile
Guangzhou Culinary Delicacy And Viagra Substitute:
Here Kitty!
Date: July 26, 2007 4:19:46 PM GMT
Tortured cats won't
make you more virile
By Wang Yong
2007-7-25
THERE's more than one way to skin a cat, but for most people, the
Cantonese way is beyond comprehension.
In Guangzhou, screeching cats are bashed on the head and plunged
into boiling water (still alive and yowling), but they finally
expire with a whimper, using up their ninth life just to satisfy
the demand for ultimate freshness of finicky Cantonese
"gourmets."
The more cats are tortured, the fresher the taste of the meat, some
of the Cantonese are said to believe.
And cat meat, they say, is great for virility. Business is very
brisk.
This is all according to an investigative report by New Express,
republished yesterday by Xinhua news agency.
Ji Xuguang, the New Express reporter who went to several cat fairs
and restaurants for his secret investigation, said he witnessed
cats wailing desperately when they were smashed by iron rods and
then thrown into boiling water.
On Sunday, Ji went to a restaurant tucked away down a shabby alley
in Guangzhou.
The chef used a specially made iron clip to clasp a fat cat by its
throat, smashed it to the ground, and hit its head with an iron
rod.
Then it was thrown into a pot of boiling water.
Dumbfounded by the cruelty, Ji left the restaurant and talked to
residents nearby.
Someone told him that the restaurant's business had been very good,
especially in winter, when long lines of customers were
commonplace.
Ji said many Cantonese believe that eating cat flesh enhances men's
sexual potency and the balance of yin and yang.
I believe that most Chinese people abhor such cruel killing of
cats.
Most people simply don't understand why someone would eat cats,
dogs, monkeys, even snakes.
There are many ways to enhance one's sexual ability. Spare the
cats.
Having said that, I am profoundly dismayed by human nature.
Fundamentally speaking, human beings are the cruelest animals in
the world.
Yes, we love cats and are terrified at their cruel death. But
haven't we tolerated the cruel deaths of chickens, birds, fish and
snakes?
Does anyone ever bother to cry over the struggling fish when a chef
peels its scales while it's alive?
Does anyone feel bad when he or she steps over an ant and cruelly
terminates its life?
Yes, people who eat cats are horrible, but how about all of us -
from every corner of the world - who eat fish and pork and
chicken?
Mankind tends to sympathize with those lives who are closest and
dearest to them. We cry over the death of cats and dogs, but we
enjoy salmon and tuna, giving no thought to how the fish had been
sliced alive.
www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article.htm
***************************************************
Guangzhou Culinary Delicacy And Viagra Substitute: Here
Kitty!
Shu-Ching Jean Chen
Forbes
07.25.07
Not all Chinese meat eaters are bothered by the high price of pork,
the culprit behind China’s runaway inflation. Consumers in the
southern Chinese city of Guangzhou savor an alternative delicacy:
cat meat.
An investigative report on Tuesday by the city's famous muckraking
newspaper Xin Kuai Bao added cat to the long list of rare meats
Guangzhou diners have devoured to their heart's content, including
the cat's favorite prey, rat. While rat has recently been sold as
"heavenly dragon meat" in Guangzhou, cats are being packaged into a
dish called "a scramble of dragon and tiger."
In accordance with its long-standing investigative tradition, Xin
Kuai Bao sent reporters to pose as customers and took a batch of
photos featuring the full brutality of the cat-cooking process.
Pictures posted online show a skinny white cat being boiled alive
while a worker beat it with a wooden stick, said to help mix the
blood with the meat and thus enhance the flavor of the dish. Its
skin was later stripped off completely by a modern, high-speed
plucking machine.
Beyond purely culinary considerations, the flesh and blood of cats
are considered to have a particular benefit in restoring male
sexual potency. In spite of the wide piracy of Viagra in China, men
continue to turn to such extraordinary sources for help.
The newspaper traced the cat consumption trade back to the
countryside or the streets of towns in several central Chinese
provinces: Henan, Hebei, Jiangxi, Anhui and Zhejiang. Commercial
cat owners sell their animals to wholesalers, and stray cats are
rounded up and sold by cat catchers, many of them farmers, at less
than 3 yuan (17 cents) per creature, a meager price but nonetheless
an important income supplement for poor rural dwellers.
At Guangzhou’s largest live animal wholesale market, in the
suburbs, tens of thousands of cats change hands at a price of 7
yuan (92 cents) each. These are then marked up to sell to several
Guangzhou restaurants at about 20 yuan ($2.64) per Chinese jin (500
grams). A full serving of "a scramble of dragon and tiger" can
fetch a price of between 150 yuan ($19.80) and 380 yuan ($50) in
top restaurants, the report said.
Guangdong province, of which Guangzhou is the capital, was the
origin of the SARS epidemic that erupted in 2003. The disease was
thought to have spread through the eating of civets, a catlike
carnivore that is a carrier of the SARS virus, though some
scientists have now fingered bats as the original reservoir of the
disease.
www.forbes.com/guangzhou.html