In a parking lot in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, police found 45 cages packed with live cats. Next to them were four boxes containing 80 bodies preserved on ice. Nine people were arrested and confessed to something they had been doing for three years: setting traps to steal cats, many snatched from the hands of their own owners.
The meat was sold for about $2.80 per kilo, with deliveries at least twice a week. Phuong Pham, from the NGO Humane World for Animals Vietnam, sums it up with a figure that is hard to stomach: thousands of cats are slaughtered in the country every month, ending up in a slaughterhouse or on a plate.
Of the nearly 400 rescued, only 40 returned to their families. Some 260 remain in custody, including kittens born after the operation and females that gave birth at the police station itself. Several did not make it: they arrived so malnourished and dehydrated that they did not survive. The Saigon Zoo publishes their photos daily, hoping that someone else will recognize them in time.
