According to the newspaper South China Morning Postthe owner’s name is Zhang and he lives in Huzhou in Zhejiang province just west of Shanghai.
She discovered that her beloved cat “Mantou” had disappeared on January 5. The Mantou is a British Shorthair and had a tracking device around its neck, allowing the owner to trace the cat to the neighboring province of Jiangsu to the north.
Zhang feared the cat had been kidnapped and called the police. But after looking at surveillance footage, police claimed they could find no evidence of a cat kidnapping and did not pursue the case further.
At the same time, Zhang could see that the tracking device of the cat was now further south and was heading towards the southern city of Guangzhou over 1,500 kilometers away.
Got local help
The missing cat was found in a truck together with several other cats, which are also suspected to have been stolen. Animal welfare activists claim the cats were on their way to a slaughterhouse. Photo: Weibo
She chose to move around and got on a plane to the aforementioned Guangzhou. She posted a post on the social media Weibo before hopping on the plane, asking for help on how to find the cat in the foreign city.
A local animal welfare organization picked up on the message and decided to help. By the time her plane landed, the group had tracked down the cat and not only that, they had found it in a truck stuffed with cats.
To the Yangtse Evening Post, the animal rights activists say that they are convinced that the truck was on its way to a slaughterhouse to become human food. The truck driver claimed he had gotten all the cats from a friend. Due to a lack of evidence, he was not arrested.
China turned on cat and dog meat
After the coronavirus spread from the wet market in Wuhan in China, there has been an increased focus on the country’s meat consumption of both wild animals and traditional pets such as dogs and cats.
In 2020, the Ministry of Agriculture in China introduced a ban on the sale of dog and cat meat. The ban came in the form of an updated regulation with a list of which animal species are allowed to be traded for human consumption. Dogs are not included in the list, and thus prohibited from selling to and from slaughterhouses, restaurants and food markets.
