A Vietnamese restaurant where as much as 300 cats a month were drowned to feed guests has been closed.
Pham Quoc Doanh, owner of Gia Bao in Thái Nguyên in northeastern Vietnam, told Metro that he knew a few of them were pets but had no alternative because he needed the cash.
Doanh said he added cat meat to the restaurant’s menu to extend its profits because he was struggling to support his family, noting that there have been no other restaurants nearby selling the meat.
Metro reported that Doanh drowned the cats one after the other in a bucket. “I felt sorry for them when I saw them suffering during the slaughter,” he said.
“When I think about the thousands of cats I have slaughtered and handled here over the years, it makes me sad,” Doanh said in a press release issued by the animal protection group Humane Society International. “Cat theft is so common in Vietnam that I know that many of the cats sold here are someone’s beloved family companion, and I am very sorry about that.”
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In 2022, HSI launched a program offering financial incentives to Vietnamese restaurants in the event that they stop selling cat and dog meat and put the animals up for adoption. Doanh received a one-time grant in exchange for closing the restaurant and giving back the animals.
Now he plans to open a food market as a substitute, HSI said.
“Now that I have closed my cat slaughter business, I feel calmer, more confident and happy about my future without killing any more animals,” Doanh told Metro.
Animal welfare groups Four Paws and Change For Animals Foundation said in a 2020 report that greater than 1 million stray and domestic cats are killed for his or her meat in Vietnam yearly.
“Some restaurants purchase animals directly from cat thieves and slaughter them themselves on their premises, but most work with wholesalers and slaughterhouses,” Dr. Katherine Polak, a veterinarian and director of Four Paws Stray Animal Care in Southeast Asia, said in a press release.
The report found that cats most frequently drown, but in some cases they’re mauled to death, boiled alive or electrocuted.
“We found many cats with collars within the warehouse, which was a transparent sign that they were pets,” said Polak.
HSI says its program in Vietnam also helped close two dog restaurants in Thái Nguyên.
