Want to get rid of your cat? Throw it out of a high-rise window. No problem. Legal in China

Chongqing, China - opinion: Yes, once again, I'm going to be highly critical of China in respect of their lack of animal welfare laws and their lack of respect on too many occasions for the sentience of domestic cats and dogs. They deserve to be criticised because the kind of cruelty we see on Twitter perpetrated upon these innocent animals is truly shocking.

The tweet:

#China: May 22, Chongqing. Pet cat was thrown to death by the neighbor. The owner: What kind of person can do such a thing? There's no legislation on cruelty to #animals. Those crazy people cannot be sanctioned.

Comment: I take that tweet to mean that the cat's owner threw their cat out of a high-rise window. I could be wrong but they threw the cat with such force that death was instant on contact with the ground due to blunt force trauma and catastrophic injuries. This happened by the way during Covid when some cat owners in China were anxious about getting Covid from their cat.

Without animal welfare laws, cat owners in China can simply throw their cat out of their apartment window hundreds of feet from the ground below. Job done. No problem. Within the law. There is no law. It is madness. It looks so completely wrong. It is completely wrong. The problem is that the people who do it do not see it as wrong. They see it as normal. This is because there has never been animal welfare laws protecting the general population of cats and dogs in China.

Cat owners and dog owners in China grow up without any real concept of what is legal and illegal in terms of animal welfare. There's just no norms to guide them on this. And their morality about cat and dog welfare is based upon a tradition that cats and dogs should be utilitarian. They should be useful. When they can't entertain anymore, they should be eaten.

This ancient tradition is gradually being eroded by modern life and the Internet no doubt has changed the minds of many thousands of Chinese people living in China but the vast majority of Chinese in China, it seems to me, just don't get the concept of animal welfare or that cats and dogs are sentient creatures.

If you asked them about the concept of sentience, they probably wouldn't know what you're talking about.