Vietnam has no animal cruelty laws, so eating cat meat is legal. But the practice continues. A ban on cat meat for human consumption was introduced in February 1998 by former Prime Minister Nguyen Cong Tan, but the law has been largely ignored. Many officials enjoy eating cat meat and believe it brings good luck. In some parts of the USSR, even people in high places like the president are eating cat meat. Whether the practice is legal or not, the issue of animal cruelty in the country is deeply rooted in its culture.
During the siege of Leningrad
During the siege of Leningrado, animals went extinct. Human beings can only go without food for 21 days. In that time, humans were forced to consume dead people and animals. As a result, the population of the city plummeted. Residents ate wood glue, wallpaper paste, boiled leather belts, and even buds on low branches of trees in spring.
The Siege of Leningrad is a horrific chapter in the history of a city that was almost completely destroyed by the Nazis. The winter of 1941-1942 made life in Leningrad a living hell. The winter that followed brought suffocating cold and starvation. Despite this, many people tried to save the city’s animals.
In many parts of the world
In many parts of the world cats were killed or eaten. The number read more here of deaths attributed to cats varied from three to twenty billion per year, and the majority of deaths were caused by hunters, not anthropogenic causes. In some areas, such as Africa, cats were even worshipped as deities. In Egypt, the cat cult at Bubastis was so widespread that followers of the goddess Bast made bronze statues of cats and mummified hundreds of thousands of cats.
The Egyptians forbade the export of cats, but clever crews found a way around the law and exported the cats to Greece, Rome, and Northern Europe. In fact, the ancient Greeks and Phoenicians, master sea-farers, were responsible for spreading the stigma that cats were eaten and killed by witches. In these cultures, cats were associated with witchcraft and plague, and their population declined.
In small villages in Vietnam
Hunting cats was explicitly forbidden in Vietnam until January 2020. Since then, the law against hunting cats has been revoked. There is still a high demand for cat meat in Vietnam, particularly in rural areas like the north. However, cat meat consumption is spreading throughout the country, including Ho Chi Minh City. Although Vietnam banned the practice in 2010, many people still eat cat meat. There is little scientific evidence that proves the practice is acceptable, but the locals claim that the cat meat is good for their health.
Vietnamese farmers still sell cat meat. Some farmers have been selling tails for over a decade, and it has even become a popular food item in some restaurants, such as Little Tiger. The Vietnamese have long eaten cat meat, as they are the natural prey for mice and rats. However, the fetish for eating cats has led to a huge rat overpopulation problem. Despite the ban, Vietnamese people have been eating cats and stealing their tails. This has caused the population of rats to skyrocket.
In some parts of the USSR
The Soviet Union imposed a strict quota on food, and in some parts, cats were killed and eaten. In mid-1932, 75 percent of Ukrainian farms were forcibly collected for food. Stalin ordered a sharp increase in quotas, and in January 1933, they reached zero. It was a horrific practice, but the Soviet people survived, and it is not too far-fetched to imagine what life was like for cats during the Soviet period.
There were some serious consequences to this practice, though. The Soviet Union suppressed the results of the 1937 census because it showed the low population of Ukraine. As a result, accurate estimates of the total number of cats killed and eaten were impossible without access to archives and modern demographic science. But the Holodomor still prompted the deaths of tens of millions of cats and people. In some parts of the USSR, cats and mice were killed and eaten.