I have just written a post about Tsai Ing-Wen, the first female president of Taiwan who is a devoted animal and cat lover (ailurophile) – click to read the article. She was democratically elected. She likes to post images of her cats: ‘Think Think’ and ‘Ah Tsai’, a gray and ginger tabby respectively. She has used her gray tabby in a campaign poster. It is a positive aspect of a leader’s character to live with a pet dog or cat in Taiwan. In Britain there is and has been for a long time, a house cat at number 10 Downing Street, the offices and resident of the UK Prime Minister.
And in America, it is beneficial to a president to live with a dog or cat. Normally it is a dog because the president thus far has always been a man and men normally like dogs. But that isn’t the point. The point is that there are a lot of photographs of presidents with their dogs and cats because they are deemed to be beneficial to the image of the president.
In a stark illustration of the difference in culture between America and China, it is considered detrimental to the image of the non-democratically elected President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, to be seen with a cat or dog. Well, he would never be seen with a cat. That would totally finish his leadership! But we don’t see him with a dog either. I don’t think he wants to be seen as human and having a pet is a very human aspect of the human race.
Perhaps his family has a dog but if that is the case it is kept secret. Even Putin is seen with dogs all the time and he loves dogs. Putin and Xi are best mates but they have a culture clash when it comes to presenting their image to their citizens.
So, in America, pets build the president’s image whereas in China it apparently achieves the opposite. This must reflect on the attitude of the Chinese generally towards animals and it may go some way to explain why there are no general animal welfare laws in China to protect animals.
RELATED: Pet ownership surging in China but still no general animal welfare law!
President Xi Jinping has publicly supported the cat meat trade and the fur trade in the south of China. This is a brutal business with mass cruelty and the barbaric slaughter of animals. Yes, he supports it. Apparently, he also supports the protection of the snow leopard but in the same breath he appears to support the poaching of the Bengal tiger for consumption of its body parts in China. The man is schizophrenic in his attitude towards animal welfare.
A Chinese person who lives in China tells us that Chinese leaders are promoted from grassroots to the highest level. They are cultured a bit like plants to lead the nation and at the outset they live in county government dormitories where there are a lot of people all living together. It is inconvenient in this environment to have pets. Pets are not allowed in the civil servant dormitories. That may help engender this disconnect between pets and leaders in China.
And apparently there have been two previous emperors of China, both with a bad image of being poor leaders, and both of whom were pet lovers. Zhu Houzhao(朱厚照), the emperor of the Ming Dynasty in China, was a playboy labelled the “Zoo Chief”. He built a royal zoo and lived in it. He preferred it to living in the palace. And the other was Emperor Zhu Zhanji(朱瞻基) of the Ming Dynasty. He had a fascination for crickets. These two emperors also may be part of the reason why there is this disconnect between pets and Chinese leaders.
In essence, pets detract from the image of a leader in China which is the opposite to what happens in the West. As I say, this is a reflection on the general attitude towards animals in China where they eat anything that that walks or crawls. I can’t get to the bottom of the original reason why there is this stark difference between East and West.
There are many social media accounts, often by pretty women, who would like to show off their culinary skills in slaughtering domestic and exotic wild animals and cooking them for consumption. To the West it looks disgusting but to the East it looks interesting and these social media pages and images are popular.
Below are some more pages on China.
