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Old ladies in their 60s, 70s or even 80s. Cats and dogs numbered in the hundreds. You might not put these two groups together but in some of the neglected corners near China’s most dazzling cities, they seem to belong so together that neither could imagine a life without the other.
Running back and forth between two shelters as if struggling to hang on to two full-time jobs, 70-year-old Huo Puyang and her daughter-in-law are nursing hundreds of cats in each location. Some accuse them of hoarding cats but a visit to their crammed “zoos” would dispel the faintest notion that “hoarding” such a huge number of animals is something fun or even profitable, as once suggested by China’s influential newspaper Southern Weekend.
Both of their lives revolve around these cats, plus a few dogs who were the “by-rescues” of their career. It is a 24/7 business and simply feeding the cats is a full-time job. At one location, in the countryside way outside of Shanghai’s urban core, 600 feline mouths keep the stoves and woks running almost non-stop. Ms. Huo and her daughter-in-law do their best to provide a healthy diet for the cats, cooking combinations of vegetables, fish, and meat on top of a base of packaged cat food. As many, if not most, of these animals have been strays or abandoned before becoming part of this huge family, some have serious health issues, if not missing a leg or an eye. For them, Ms. Huo supplements their nutritional diet with an extra dose of herbal medicine.
Of course, there are chores like cleaning up the cat litter and dog urine on the floors, and with so many of these animals, having the time or resources to walk the dogs is simply not an option. In fact, these animals keep Ms. Huo, her daughter-in-law and a couple of volunteer-like staff members so busy that they sometimes fall off the stairs from exhaustion. Sleeping more than four hours straight is a luxury.
In downtown Shanghai, another group of people are putting up another kind of fight to save animals: A physical one. Every day, retired cat lover Ms. Cui feeds the stray cats in her neighborhood and often, she’ll receive a phone call tipping her off to a truck or two loaded with cats, hundreds usually, being trafficked to Guangdong to become meat. She would then call up her comrades, sometimes a couple of dozen a time, and head out to intercept these trucks.
It’s like warfare. If they’re lucky, the police stations along the chase route stand on their side, and help them take down the trucks to save the hundreds of cute lives from the dinner table. But there are times, plenty of them, when the local police would stand with the cat traffickers, saying that this is a “legitimate” business, by which they mean “pet shipment.” In most cases, the traffickers can produce seemingly legitimate paperwork, with everything from the cats’ health certificates to the transportation permits. But Ms. Cui has one powerful point to make: “What’s a pet? A pet is what you keep at home, to care for and love at home. They shipped over a thousand cats to Guangdong to be killed for meat. Are these what we call pets?”
Despite the tremendous progress and social change brought about after three decades of mind-blowing unprecedented economic development in human history, pets are just beginning to be adored as family members in China. Indeed, some lucky cats and dogs in Beijing or Shanghai eat better food than most Chinese do, and a few even get hairdressing or cosmetic services that are not affordable by most of their fellow human citizens. But by and large, a majority of Chinese still somewhat believe animals are nothing but animals, meant to serve whatever the needs are of mankind, be it as food or for fur. However outlandish it may seem from Western perspectives, this mentality still represents a large chunk of modern Chinese society and has deep roots especially in rural areas.
With all this we see some reason why a handful of individuals are stretching their personal resources to shelter and help animals like stray cats and dogs. Ms. Huo and her daughter-in-law are just two of them. Nowadays in almost every city, a few of these passionate animal lovers have set up animal shelters on their own, nursing the abandoned and the sick, hoping that the animals they’ve rescued can soon be adopted by new, loving pet owners. However, this often becomes a black hole, consuming all the wealth and energy of these heroes and their families while animal populations explode exponentially.
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Over the last few years, a documentary project has introduced us to a number of these extraordinary people, who have made a career of rescuing animals, the Chinese way. While most Western animal rescue groups tend to resort to euthanasia before their populations get out of control, most of these Chinese women refuse to do so. We hope our documentary, Heroes for Life, when finished later this year, will raise more awareness of this issue in China, and help relieve some of the burdens from these heroes, many of whom are on the brink of bankruptcy.
Watch the trailer below, and help us finish this project. And spread the word.
Images courtesy of Lai Xiaoyu, a Shanghai cat rescuer.
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