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/200707/20070725/article_324601.htm
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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/2007/07/25/guangzhou-catmeat-delicacy-face.html