Chinese Cats

I bet that when some of you read that the Chinese were killing cats en masse in Beijing, (done in the name of putting on a good front for the upcoming Summer Olympics) that the first thing you thought was “good” and the second thing you thought was “dinner.”

However, when I heard that this was happening, the first thing I thought was that if I were a rat, I’d be applying for a Chinese visa. Along those lines Rick Moran points out that

[w]hipping up a frenzy of emotion against cats was a favorite ploy of the church in the middle ages. In something of a delicious irony (from the cat’s perspective) when our ancestors had killed off most of the cats in Europe, invading rats overran the continent. They bore fleas that carried bubonic plague that killed of a third of its population. In their frenzy to burn witches and murder their “familiars,” Europeans were unwittingly sealing their doom by eliminating their only salvation against the plague carrying rats – cats.

The Chinese don’t give the cats the needle or spay/neuter them like we would; they round them up, put them in a feline gulag and starve them to death. Lovely. Will PETA be intervening?

Anyway, Communist China’s demonstrable disregard for the dignity of life and death for any of God’s creature isn’t so shocking. I mean what can one expect from a nation based on the unconstrained vision of human character? Answer: anything.

What I’m surprised by--again--is the short-time thinking and the failure to learn from history. I guess I shouldn’t be, however. After all, this is a government which (still) has a one-child policy that in practice induces families to kill off their girl children. (Don’t forget this when you see an American couple who has an adopted girl child from China.) We've seen how young men behave when their marriage prospects are slim to non-existent.

Will the West and Japan have to come to China's aid in the near future because of this or some similar decision of expediency that China has made? The two would certainly offer. But I'm guessing that China would rather that a substantial portion of its population die of bubonic plague rather than accept help from us--especially from the Japanese.

As a matter of fact, if I had more faith in the ChiComs' long-term planning abilities, I'd say that they're hoping that a plague epidemic breaks out. It would take care of a lot of their problems--at least the ones which they think they have.

In the meantime, hug your pets--and your daughters.