Chinese police find slaughterhouse selling cat meat
Police claim owners of underground abattoir in a village in eastern China were selling cat meat to butchers who then repackaged it and sold it as rabbit
Chinese police have unearthed the country's latest horrifying food scandal during a pre-dawn raid on an illegal slaughterhouse that was contaminating the food chain with thousands of domestic cats.
The discovery was made at around 4.30am on Wednesday morning when a tip-off led police and food safety officers to a clandestine abattoir in Chang'an village in the city of Huaian, around 260 miles northwest of Shanghai.
Inside one anonymous residential building, they found freezers packed with the brittle carcasses of dozens of domestic cats.
"The floor was spattered with blood and there was bad smell," the local Modern Express newspaper reported in a grisly dispatch from inside the slaughterhouse.
The Modern Express claimed the abattoir's specialty had been transforming the corpses of thousands of "homeless and domesticated" felines into a lucrative and illegal trade.
Some of the cats were kept alive and shipped to the southern provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi where they were sold for around 10 yuan (£1) per animal. Others were slaughtered in situ or died in their cages before being sold to butchers or at local markets under the guise of "rabbit".
The "rabbit" was then served in local restaurants, state media claimed.
A set of police photographs was released to domestic media on Thursday, painting a shocking image of conditions inside the secret slaughterhouse.
In one photograph the furry corpses of domestic cats can be seen lying on top of an open freezer while another shows stacks of skinned animals separated into transparent plastic bags.
Another picture shows a group of live cats crammed into rusty metal cages while a final image shows cat skins that have been discarded on a filthy concrete floor.
The Modern Express said 60 live cats had been rescued from the slaughterhouse while 100 pieces of cat skin and 66lb of cat meat were recovered.
But the newspaper suggested the true scale of the business was far greater.
"The slaughterhouse has existed for over one year and cat shrieks were often heard," it reported. "Every two or three days, a bus came to take away around one hundred cages of cats."
Scarcely a week goes by without a new food scandal appearing in the pages of Chinese newspapers.
In May, Shanghai dinners were shocked to learn that the lamb they had been consuming could in fact have been rat, mink or fox. The following month police in Guangxi province claimed to have seized 20 tonnes of out-of-date chickens feet dating back to 1967.
Some of the most notorious scandals include glow-in-the-dark pork, exploding watermelons and yoghurt forged from the rubber soles of thrown-away shoes.
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