So those who plan to visit Beijing over the next few months might notice, while passing through the capital city’s famous hutongs, something different about China’s capital city. You might find yourself stopping on the street suddenly and saying to your companion, “Wait, weren’t there more cats here the last time I was here?” That assumes that the traveler had been to P.O.C. Beijing (pre-Olympic cleansing), a Beijing that has since and forever been replaced by the sterile, safe and smogless city that will host the Summer Games. But back to the cats. As part of turning the old Beijing into the new Beijing, the Chinese government has launched an offensive not on vandals or vagrants (they’re already gone), but on stray cats. Yes, cats. According to a Daily Mail story Monday, secretive government employees are rounding up all the forsaken feline friends and well, brutally killing them. As the Daily Mail reports:

Hundreds of cats a day are being rounded and crammed into cages so small they cannot even turn around. Then they are trucked to what animal welfare groups describe as death camps on the edges of the city. The cull comes in the wake of a government campaign warning of the diseases cats carry and ordering residents to help clear the streets of them.

China’s leaders are convinced that the cats in Beijing are diseased and can transmit sickness to humans, and in particular, those humans who have purchased tickets to the Olympics. Reports claim the cats are beaten to death with sticks or left to starve in cages so confining, the kitties can’t turn around. While animal activists in China recognize the need to remove the city’s stray cats ahead of the Games, they have criticized the inhumane methods of killing the cats. Perhaps Chinese cat lovers would prefer the cat collectors to treat the animals as they would human undesirables in China and shoot them in the back of head at close range.

Photo: Daily Mail

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