Fighting for feline friends
Founder of cat rescue and adoption center strives to give each animal a proper home
At a cat rescue and adoption center in Chengdu, Sichuan province, a young woman is going through an adoption process the center sees as a necessary ritual that attests to their bonding. She already has an orange tabby at home and has decided to find it a companion by adopting a kitten.
After filling in an online questionnaire about adoption, she is at the center to pick up the kitten, which she will take home complete with adoption papers and pictures with which to remember the occasion.
The center’s founder, Xu Zhe, heads a team of nine that takes responsibility for rescuing cats in Chengdu and in nearby Chongqing. Chengdu is located in a basin and is notorious for its muggy and overcast climate, but in the cat rescue center, outside the city’s third ring road, the atmosphere is one of supreme comfort.
Several tabby cats stretch out on a chair with their round faces lost in sleep; other cats meow and swipe their tail gently at your feet; some lie meekly in volunteers’ arms, dozing but somehow seeming alert. Here, newborn kittens and their mothers live safely in isolated rooms with ample food and clean water, waiting for adopters.
Xu’s internet stray cat adoption and rescue service, Living with Cats, has tens of millions of followers across the country. Beginning in April 2019, Xu filmed instances of rescuing stray cats, edited them into videos and uploaded them to the video website Bilibili. He was awarded one of the site’s top 100 content creators last year. His rescue work predates that, starting in early 2016.
The rescue center does not accept monetary donations, but those who support it send cat food, cat litter and cans of food from all over the country, meaning that cupboards at the center are never empty. Relying on the rewards and subsidies of video platforms, Living with Cats receives a fee every month.
This is a drop in the bucket that barely covers operating costs, and the time and effort that Xu and his team pour into their work do not equate to the figures you find in a healthy bank statement. The ultimate reward for those who work is knowing they are saving cats’ lives. More than 300 cats were rescued in 2019, and more than 200 were put out for adoption, Xu said.
Such success has only served to bolster his ambitions.
“Our goal this year is to create an online adoption service, a mini-program on WeChat, in which our activities come into their own, and we sift out the scammers and cat dealers,” Xu said. “Most importantly, we want to set up a screening protocol and help adopters we are unable to help elsewhere in the country.”
As he has made hundreds of videos about saving cats, it dawned on him that unscientific pet raising and problems with stray animals often start with someone deciding on a whim to have a pet, ignorant of the responsibilities this involves.
The idea of raising pets as emotional support for people has turned into an attractive business proposition that has led to overbreeding, which, Xu said, makes it all too easy to obtain a pet at little cost.
“I want to make some more popular and interesting science videos to deal with the root of the problem and to show people how to treat animals in a methodical and logical way.
“As our videos become popular we receive many messages every day, and we tell about how stray cats can be looked after properly. You can’t just feed stray animals in a haphazard way, and by sterilization and adoption we are slowly coming to grips with this problem.”
Those who admire what Xu is doing have nicknamed him the Cat Fighter, and the reason for that is
clear from the many exploits he has had plucking cats from peril and even the jaws of death. These include saving a dying cat trapped in a 10-meter-deep elevator well; retrieving a tabby cat from a sewer after it had not eaten for almost a week, and; plucking to safety a stray cat trapped in a tree 20 meters high.
In the video, Xu, wearing rimmed black glasses, looks bookish, yet he has much more dexterity than someone who simply turns pages. He is strong and often needs to be faster and even more nimble than the cats he is trying to save.
After a tip-off is received he hits the road, and if all goes well, returns with the rescued cat to the center, where the recovery mission continues, with the fortunate cat receiving copious doses of attention as well as food and any other physical help it may need. Though there is a common thread running through his routine — hear, go and seek, find, bring back to the center — Xu has myriad workplaces, whether it be the roof of a shed, the outer wall of a high-rise building, the deep well of an elevator, or a sewer next to a river.
One of his most difficult rescues last year, he said, involved two cats that had fallen into a building’s ventilation shaft, where they remained trapped for three days. He descended into the shaft using a safety rope, but the rope broke, and once that problem was resolved he ran into a construction work slag heap. Before he could get anywhere near the cats, he had to remove some of the slag, take it to the top, and descend again to get more slag, repeating this process many times.
That was all captured on video, and it pains him each time he watches it, he said. Also last year, a cat cafe in Chengdu on the verge of bankruptcy was found abandoned, with cats locked in cages and feces everywhere. An investigation into this cafe brought to light evidence of similar cases in the country.
The breeding ground for the cat cafe horror was a market that makes it all too easy to set up such businesses, Xu said.
“You may want to get into this field and have your own cash cow, but the bottom line is that to be worthy of this calling you need to regard life as sacred and to really look after the cats. I’m keen to see that there are tighter regulations to keep market forces in check.”
Injuries while rescuing cats are common, he said, and that of course includes being scratched or bitten by cats.
In addition to physical scars, Xu and those who work with him also face emotional challenges. Some people take a dim view of what they do and even refer to cat and dog lovers in a sneering way, he said.
Xu draws on a saying common on the internet: “You may be unable to love them, but please do not harm them.”
“It is a very complicated issue,” he said. “Right now it’s the concept of pet raising we are changing, and laws are needed to protect small animals. Promoting adoption rather than purchase is also something we devote ourselves to.”
The most conspicuous entrance of the rescue center has a wall in front of which hangs a large red curtain. In this room everyone who adopts a cat goes through a ceremony akin to a Chinese marriage officiation: reading an oath of care, having a photo taken just as newlyweds would, and being issued a certificate.
Here, 300 yuan ($47) is the minimum charge, the paid adoption including three free vaccine shots. Xu insists on the charge, saying he believes that it helps ensure that anyone wanting to truly care for a cat will be made conscious of the minimum they will need to spend on their companion every month.
All that then remains, as in the aftermath of a marriage ceremony, is to live up to the promise to accompany the cat for a lifetime.