Pictures of 154 purebred cats smuggled by the sea route from mainland China to Taiwan

I have written about this before but I did not have these pictures available to me at that time. The two pictures are worth a thousand words because they give a very clear idea what it was like to smuggle these purebred cats across the sea from mainland China to Taiwan. 

Pictures of 154 purebred cats smuggled by the sea route from mainland China to Taiwan.  Picture: Coastguard admin.

Pictures of 154 purebred cats smuggled by the sea route from mainland China to Taiwan. Picture: Coastguard admin.

This was a valuable cargo which was entirely destroyed by the authorities. What you see is part of it but in all 154 purebred cats including Ragdolls and Bengal cats was seized by the authorities and killed because of bio-security risks. They say that the cats may have had diseases which might present a problem to the human population in Taiwan into the future. They couldn't risk these diseases being spread to people. They didn't consider quarantine which I think would have been a more humane method. In other words, they could have quarantined them for long enough for any disease to be cleared and ticked off.

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There was outrage as predicted when the news leaked out to the population. In response, Tsai Ing-wen, the president of Taiwan, responded as a cat lover. She lives with two cats herself. She hoped that in the future a more humane method would be chosen to deal with smuggled cats but in the meantime, she supported the coastguard and the authorities for killing the cats. Reading between the lines I would say that she was deeply disturbed by the killing but she felt that she had to support the authorities for obvious reasons.

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There were calls to amend the existing laws so that this sort of killing wouldn't happen again and the president of the country called for amendments to the existing laws so that these situations could be handled "with the spirit of humanity" to use her words.

The cargo, in all, has been valued at around US$357,000 or 10 million Taiwanese dollars. On monetary value alone, it would have been wise to have found an alternative method to killing them. These were sentient beings and they could have found homes for them. The money raised could have been ploughed back into animal rescue in Taiwan to save lives. It is very easy to destroy something, even sentient, beings but much harder to find the more difficult route and stick to it, even if it is frustrating, troublesome but far more humane.