Vietnam restaurant that drowned 300 cats a month for meat closes

A Vietnamese slaughterhouse that drowned 300 cats a month for the Southeast Asian nation’s feline meat commerce has been closed down for good.

Pham Quoc Doanh, 37, ran the Gia Bảo restaurant within the Thịnh Đán ward of Thái Nguyên, the capital of the northeast province of the identical identify, for 5 years.

‘Specialty cat meat,’ the signal outdoors the eatery on Quang Trung Street as soon as learn, with {a photograph} of a wide-eyed black cat within the top-right nook.

Eating cats is comparatively widespread in Vietnam, the place the decade-old urge for food for felines has seen their meat be thought of an aphrodisiac, fortunate allure and even a health-boosting superfood that combats Covid-19.

Doanh by no means wished to promote cat meat. He by no means wished to run a slaughterhouse drowning the animals to maintain his diners’ bellies full, including to the a million cats, primarily strays and stolen pets, killed for his or her meat a yr in Vietnam.

‘Before selling cat meat at this restaurant I served other normal food and drinks,’ the father-of-two tells Metro.co.uk.

‘However, the income was not enough to cover the living cost of my family. It was then I tried selling cat meat since there was no other available restaurant serving this in the area.’

One by one, Doanh would drown the cats in a bucket, holding them down with a stick. Knowing that a few of the animals he was butchering had been individuals’s beloved pets weighed closely on his thoughts.

‘I felt sorry for them when I saw them suffering during slaughtering. It was all about money since I had to make money for my whole family,’ Doanh provides.

But earlier this month, he stood outdoors surrounded by plastic yellow tables and chairs and practically two dozen cats as he tore down his restaurant signal.

He had reached out to Humane Society International (HSI), an animal rights group that started a marketing campaign in opposition to the cat meat commerce in Vietnam final yr, for assist.

As a part of the organisation’s ‘Models for Change’ programme, Doanh struck a take care of HSI for a one-time grant to shutter Quán Gia Bảo for good, saving the lives of 20 caged cats and kittens.

The programme gives monetary incentives to cat meat restaurant house owners to modify to different livelihoods and quit their animals for adoption.

The cats had been taken to an animal rescue centre run by the Thai Nguyen University of Agriculture and Forestry for much-needed veterinary care, vaccination and rehabilitation.

The animals will now be given to new house owners to be cherished and treasured as pets.

HSI, which efficiently campaigned in South Korea to shut down canine meat farms by 2027, has moreover helped shut two canine slaughterhouses/eating places in Thái Nguyên.

‘We are thrilled to be closing down our first cat meat trade business in Viet Nam, and hope it will be the first of many as more people like Mr Doanh turn away from this cruel trade,’ Quang Nguyen, HSI’s Vietnam companion animals and engagement program supervisor, says.

Raising dogs and cats for meat stays in style in some nations, comparable to Switzerland, Indonesia and Nigeria, the place it’s usually cheaper than different meats, a part of the native custom or thought to have particular well being properties.

It’s tough to measure the worldwide canine and cat meat trades. These industries usually function underground and are barely regulated, if in any respect.

Governments sometimes don’t class cats or dogs as livestock, the way in which cows and chickens are, that means farmers don’t have to provide information on what number of they’re slaughtering and promoting off.

But in nations comparable to South Korea and China, the observe is falling out of trend as concern for animal welfare rises.

Eating cats and dogs stays a gray space in different nations. Some prohibit the butchering and sale of canine and cat meat whereas not explicitly banning it, comparable to in France and the UK.

Dog meat has by no means been banned by the Vietnamese authorities, costing about the identical as beef within the retailers.

In 1998, Phan Văn Khải, the then-prime of Vietnam, issued a directive banning the looking, slaughtering and consumption of cats in a bid to maintain rodent populations low and cat possession excessive.

However, the coverage expired in 2020. Now round two in 10 Vietnamese individuals eat cat meat, in accordance with a Nielson ballot commissioned by HSI.

Sprawling networks of merchants, slaughterhouses, market distributors and back-alley eating places preserve the commerce alive and worthwhile, with hotspots together with the coastal cities of Đà Nẵng and Hội An, in accordance with analysis by Four Paws.

Cats aren’t farmed for his or her meat, so sly suppliers are identified to rob pet cats or lure feral felines utilizing home made spring-loaded snares earlier than retaining retaining them in holding areas for days.

From the slaughterhouse, cat meat sellers hand the carcasses to eating places the place clients tuck right into a plate of greens, spicy dipping sauce and crunchy cat intestines.

Other merchants promote or arrange street-side market stands flogging caged cats alongside useless ones as ‘tiểu hổ’, actually ‘little tiger’ or ‘baby tiger’.

Animal welfare groups say 10 to twenty cats and dogs are killed and offered a day in any given meat market.

Cat meat fetches thrice the value of their canine counterparts, with distributors charging greater than £9 per kilo for a stay cat – a black cat carries the upper price ticket of £17 as they’re believed to have therapeutic results.

When purchased, some locals will pluck the fur off the cat ‘like a chicken’, one cafe employee within the northern metropolis of Thái Bình instructed the New Zealand meals web site Stuff in 2011.

‘The scale of the suffering is astonishing,’ provides Nguyen.

But nearly all of individuals in Vietnam – 71% – are in opposition to consuming and buying and selling cat meat, the HSI ballot discovered. With 9 in 10 saying they or somebody they know have had their pet stolen.

The rising cat meat market comes because the nation has grappled for the higher a part of a decade with persistent cases of rabies regarded as transmitted from the bites of stray or wild dogs and cats.

Vietnam has as much as 100 deaths from rabies annually, in accordance with the World Health Organization.

The nation’s National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology has chalked up the rise to an absence of public consciousness and sluggish responses from native well being authorities, with the goal to stamp out rabies by 2030.

Though experts say that with the cross-country commerce in dogs and cats for the desk nonetheless thriving, and a small variety of these animals being unvaccinated, it’s doable however uncommon for transmission to happen from consuming contaminated meat.

For Doanh, realizing he was part of the cat meat business is one thing he won’t ever be happy with. He didn’t have a alternative, he stresses.

But realizing his future is one with out animal cruelty, he’s now going to attempt his hand at operating a grocery retailer.

‘Now that I’ve closed my cat slaughter business, I really feel extra peaceable in my thoughts and really feel assured and completely satisfied about my future with out killing any extra animals,’ he says.

‘I will supply a lot of products like drinks, tobacco, sweets, dry food like instant noodles, and make a living for my family that way instead.’

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