Cuddle…kill
Cruelty to animals in China's markets for business & pleasure is rampant, driven by rich consumers
Is a lion cub a toy? This shouldn't even be a question. But, in today's world, the unnatural – wild cats cuddled by humans – is normalised in a reality that's tranquillised. So, a restaurant in north China's Taiyuan city has no qualms in offering hugs with drugged lion cubs and a four-course set menu at a grand $150, selling 20 tickets a day. Tickets to a restaurant? Food's the side dish, the real delight is the cuddles – a performance for the rich to flaunt on social media. Another Chinese hotel 'trained' red pandas to crawl into guests' beds as a wake-up call, an alarm, in every sense of the word. Chinese wealthy's fetish for close and dangerous interactions with wild animals in cities is paralleled only by Latin American drug cartels' obsession with private zoos of trafficked species, an Escobar-inspired symbol of status and power. Cruelty underpins all of it. It's brutal that a spider monkey dressed up as a drug gang mascot should be killed in a Mexican shootout. An escaped Bengal tiger found in a lane along the Pacific had had its claws and fangs removed. China's new wave of cat abuse is vicious. Cat torture videos 'popular' globally are produced mostly in China, which has no animal cruelty laws.
But as horrifying as these are, China's insatiable appetite for animal parts for Chinese traditional medicine is worse – it drives the global illegal animal trade. Where there's drug trafficking, there's illegal animal trade. And all roads lead back to China. Mexican drug cartels have their claws into wildlife trafficking, supplying China's traditional medicine markets, leveraging smuggling ties with Chinese suppliers of chemicals to produce fentanyl & meth. Beijing's periodic crackdowns have little impact on animal cruelty, whether for business or pleasure. Hummingbirds are killed to make love amulets. A lion cub is made a living doll to turn a profit.
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This piece appeared as an editorial opinion in the print edition of The Times of India.
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