While dog meat ("fragrant meat") is popular and dogs are farmed in some parts of China for both meat and fur, cat is less popular and many Chinese avoid it because of a superstition that the animal will return at night to exact revenge, however it is popular in southern Guangdong, especially in a stew of cat and snake with spices. Cats are also farmed for meat and fur and animal rights groups have fought to halt mass shipments of cats into Guangdong from the north; the animals are squashed into wire cages which are tossed around, breaking limbs that poke through the mesh. Guangdong is the only province known for eating cats. An estimate by the Yangcheng Evening News suggests that a cat stall in the game-meat market can easily sell 300-400 kilograms of cat meat daily in winter. There are about 80 stalls selling cats in the three [game meat] markets. This adds up to 10,000 cats a day. The report claimed that almost all the cats sold to restaurants were domestic cats, many of which had been stolen or caught on the streets rather than purposely bred. The cats are crowded into cages and are often injured.

Freshness of ingredients is paramount and many ingredients still come from traditional markets. The animal is killed at point of sale (strangulation is one method) or, a concept abhorrent to most Westerners, bought live and trussed and killed by the buyer. Sometimes it is skinned alive with casual cruelty for the sake of freshness. Because it is hard to skin something moving without getting clawed or bitten, the animal is stunned, trussed or paralysed by neck-breaking. Killing methods in these markets may be rough and ready - bludgeoning, boiling (stunned or conscious) or stabbing.

In 2010 China appeared ready to end a centuries-old custom and remove cat and dog from the menu. According to state media, a draft law is expected to go to the National People's Congress (Chinese parliament) in April. This would be China's first law against animal abuse. Anyone caught eating cat or dog meat would face a fine of as much as 5,000 yuan (£450) and up to 15 days in jail. Organisations involved in selling cats or dogs for consumption, or their meat, could be fined between 10,000 and 500,000 yuan.

Koreans claim that cat and dog eating is an old tradition in their country though animal welfare bodies dispute this saying that pet flesh consumption came about in the 1980's and that pet flesh is a delicacy for the rich rather than being a food of necessity for the poor. Archaeological findings confirm dog-eating in Confuscian times but in the long cultural tradition of Korea, the recorded instances of eating cat or dog are almost non-existent. Korea has been occupied for prolonged periods by both Chinese and Japanese conquerors. Japanese influences eschew cat and dog eating and influence educated Koreans. Cat and dog eating thrives among working class and rural people, where the Chinese influence remains strong.

It has been reported by military personnel once stationed in Singapore (post World War II) that they had eaten cat while there. Keema Roti is a dish comprising minced lamb, mutton or beef. However, the Keema Roti at that time was reputed to contain cat and other types of meat not normally eaten. The cats lived in monsoon drains and were considered easily available at that time. While modern Singaporeans might dispute this (based on modern sensibilities), atypical food sources have been used in many countries at various times in the past. Modern Singaporean food regulations and Muslim culture restricts the type of meat used in Keema Roti and cat is not an acceptable meat among Muslim Indian and Muslim Malays. In my visit to Singapore I was advised that cat has sometimes been eaten by ethnic Chinese, a practice dying out among younger generations. The country is now very westernized and Singapore Centre for Animal Welfare emphasise that in modern Singapore, slaughter of dogs and cats for food is not permitted. Under the Singapore Wholesome Meat and Fish Act, meat can only be imported from approved sources using internationally acceptable humane methods. There is currently no accepted humane method of slaughtering dogs and cats for human consumption and such consumption is considered socially unacceptable in modern-day Singapore. There have been tales of "Thai" workers (generally of Chinese/Vietnamese origin) killing and eating dogs and sometimes cats and one case (reported by SPCA Singapore) where construction workers were jailed as a result of killing a dog.

Some Vietnamese formerly ate cat, but only through starvation. Ironically, this resulted in a rodent problem. In fact cats and dogs will have been eaten in almost any siege once other food sources had been exhausted. Cat-eating is now illegal in Vietnam because cats are essential to control rice-eating rodents, though there are accounts of raids on cat-meat restaurants. Cat-eating is considered a vice. This is comparable to the wartime eating of cat in Britain (along with other taboo meats such as whale and horse) where cats were sometimes consumed in the guise of "roof-rabbit". Similarly, it is said that cats and dogs vanished from the streets of Japan after the second world war.

In Madagascar, cats apparently make a tasty and welcome addition to an otherwise boring bowl of rice. Western travellers are advised to beware of any dish purporting to contain rabbit. Cat and rabbit are distinguishable only by the different shape of their ribs.

Cats are reputedly eaten by gypsies in various parts of India, but are not openly eaten anywhere in India. It is also reported that cats are eaten by some members of lower castes as well as by gypsy tribes such as narikorvas (a South Indian gypsy tribe) throughout India and by some people from Kerala. Cat is not openly eaten in Sri Lanka thought there are tales of butchers and restaurants in Sri Lanka illegally selling cat disguised as some other kinds of meat; however similar tales are found in Britain!/P>

Cat eating is not widespread in the Philippines and there is no commercial trade in cats, although there may be some personal consumption. Rumours of cats being delivered to Chinese restaurants apparently caused a boycott of the restaurant.

In Australia, where the feral cats have become a severe problem, Aboriginal tribes now hunt and eat the feral cats. They may have little choice because the cats have nearly wiped out their normal prey.

Every September, the Festival Gastronomico del Gato (cat eating) takes place in the town of La Quebrada, Peru, to celebrate the day of Santa Ifigenia. The cats are bred especially for the festival, nicknamed "Massacre of the Moggies", and diners believe the cat cuisine, including friend legs and tails, can cure bronchial disease or be an aphrodisiac. I have also heard of cat consumption in Mexico but this may be a racist slur. One person wrote that her house was burgled by a man of Mexican appearance. She challenged him and as he fled, he grabbed her young cat, broke its neck and pocketed its body. She had heard reports of cat being eaten at the time. She had heard many jokes about cat tacos and dismissed it as Texan bigotry. She later was told that poverty among Mexican illegal immigrants had led some to snatch cats and dogs to supplement their diet. If true, this seems to be a case of pet-flesh consumption by people to impoverished to afford more "acceptable" forms of meat rather than a Mexican tradition. There are many racial slurs about domestic pets vanishing in "ethnic areas".

In Western culture, forensic psychiatry considers killing dogs and cats (other than humanely, due to accidents or incurable illness, or by animal controllers tackling overpopulation) to be an indicative step towards a career as a serial killer.  In the USA, a man who ate cats ended up in a psychiatric hospital despite protestations that eating an animal traditionally regarded as a pet did not mean he was mentally sick. In many countries throughout the world (including Britain), animals traditionally classed as pets were eaten at times of severe food shortage e.g. war-time.

In the United States, thousands of cats are bred as a result of owners' failure to neuter their pets and end up in animal shelters where many of them are euthanized (or worse, handed over to laboratories). So long as the conditions are not stressful and the method of dispatch is humane, there is little difference in breeding cats for food and breeding them as (ultimately unwanted) pets - at the end of the day, the cat is just as dead. Readers should bear in mind that the issue is not the consumption of animals considered pets in the Western world, but the humane treatment of those destined for consumption and a legal/ethical source (i.e. not stolen or relinquished pets).

In the vast majority of cases, cats (and dogs) are eaten because they are a source of protein. They can be fed on scraps unfit for human consumption and convert those scraps into edible protein. This is no different from the family pig fed on household leftovers and windfall fruit and killed to feed the family during the winter. In some countries they are eaten through choice e.g. as a gourmet item, elsewhere they are eaten through lack of choice i.e. other animal protein sources are in short supply. Depending on how it is prepared and served, cat is described as tasting either like rabbit or like chicken.

This is illustrated in "Wenceslas Wratislaw Of Miteowitz. What He Saw In The Turkish Metropolis, Constantinople ; Experienced In His Captivity; And After His Happy Return To His Country, Committed To Writing In The Year Of Our Lord 1599": Once, on a festival after holy mass, a master-carpenter, a Christian prisoner, invited the chaplain and me to partake of a fine tabby tom-cat, which he had fed up for a long time, and named Marko. It was a fine and well-fatted cat, and I saw, with my own eyes, when the carpenter cut his throat. As my partner, Mr. Chaplain, would not go, and fettered together as we were I could not go without him, he sent us, as a present, a fore- shoulder of the cat, which I ate. It was nice meat, and I enjoyed it very much, for hunger is a capital cook, so that nothing makes one disgusted ; and if I had only had plenty of such tom-cats, they would have done me no harm. (Elsewhere in the book, the author describes how the Turks of Constantinople regularly fed stray cats.)

In "Prisoners Of War In Britain 1756 To 1815, A Record Of Their Lives, Their Romance And Their Sufferings" by Francis Abell (Published 1914), Abell wrote that in the late 1790s, numerous French prisoners were incarcerated in dungeons in Liverpool. Among these French prisoners were a number of other nationalities who had served on captured French ships. "One famous prisoner here was a Pole, named Charles Domery, whose voracity was extraordinary. He ate anything. After the surrender of the frigate on which he was captured he was so hungry that he was caught tearing the mangled limb of one of his fallen comrades. In one year he ate 174 cats, some of them alive, besides dogs, rats, candles, and especially raw meat. Although he was daily allowed the rations of ten men, he was never satisfied. One day the prison doctor tested his capacity, and at a sitting he ate fourteen pounds of raw meat and two pounds of candles, and washed it all down with five bottles of porter. Some of the French prisoners used to upbraid him with his Polish nationality, and accuse him of disloyalty to the Republic. Once, in a fit of anger at this, he seized a knife, cut two wide gashes on his bare arm, and with the blood wrote on the wall ' Vive la Republique ! ' He stood six feet two inches, was well made, and rather thin, and, despite the brutality of his taste in food, was a very amiable and inoffensive man." It sounds as if this person may have had a metabolic disorder that caused him to be continually hungry and eat inappropriate things.

In pet-keeping cultures cats and dogs are a food of last resort during times of siege or famine. Except where there is a huge rodent population, it is uneconomical to rear large numbers of cats purely for the table.

The commonest meats habitually consumed by humans (discounting subsistence hunters) are the simplest and most economical to raise - they are either herbivores or omnivores: pigs, cows, chickens, sheep, goats. They are low down on the biomass pyramid and their diet includes vegetation humans cannot digest. It is economical for cattle to convert indigestible grasses into digestible steak.

Cats are obligate carnivores and are expensive to rear, feed and fatten. They are at or near the top of the biomass pyramid. The cat consumes many prey animals e.g. pigeons, rabbits. It makes better sense for humans to eat those prey animals than to eat the cat. Humans and cats are at roughly similar levels in the food chain and are competitors rather than predator/prey. However protein is protein and most carnivores/omnivores will eat other carnivores/omnivores if the need or opportunity arises.

Cat flesh only becomes economical where the cat is fed on scraps or where it eats rodents. Otherwise the expense of rearing cats for consumption makes it an expensive delicacy. There is not much meat on a cat unless it has been specially fattened. Stray cats which rely on their own hunting or scavenging skills are generally very scrawny.

Where cat is eaten it is eaten through necessity or as a delicacy. Sometimes this is bound up with superstitious belief about certain foods endowing certain properties upon the diner, especially if the food is prepared in a particular manner. Certain animals are used in traditional remedies which owe more to superstition than to fact. This is the case in Korea. Those of a squeamish disposition will not wish to read any further.

According to veterinary professor Lin Degui at the Beijing Agriculture University, cat meat can be dangerous since cats carry parasites. Several people in Guangdog were reported as being made ill by eating street cats which had consumed rat poison. There have previously been similar reports of rat poison in cat flesh in Singapore.

In China, the skin of a cat is believed efficacious against rheumatism. In Korea, a soup or paste made from cat forms part of a traditional remedy for rheumatism although actual cat-eating is considered to be relatively rare.

The abolition of cat and dog eating in the Republic of Korea was supposedly achieved in 1978, 1980, 1984, 1986, 1988, and 1991, according to statements by Korean officials. The Korean Animal Protection Law was approved on May 7, 1991 and was supposed to prevent cat and dog eating. Despite the illegality of the cat and dog meat trade, the law is rarely enforced. Attitudes have certainly hanged, but not in the way Westerners would like. In the 1970s and 1980s, merchants proudly posed for photographs with doomed dogs and cats or allowed the activities to be filmed. In late 1998 a photographer was allegedly assaulted while trying to photograph the same activities.

Western slaughterhouses believe that a stressed animal produces tougher meat.  Popular Korean belief is that due to the adrenaline rush it creates, the more painful the death, the tastier or more potent the meat. Hence certain animals are tortured to death rather than killed outright.

Cats may first have their bones broken with a hammer, before being boiled alive and pureed into a "health drink," which may be sold in plastic packets for home consumption. They may be beaten to death in hessian sacks. Cat soup is the preferred way to prepare cat meat and kittens are considered to have a more delicate flavour. "Goyangi-tan" (Liquid cat) (being a phonetic translation it is sometimes rendered "goyangi-tang" or translated as "cat stew") is believed to have medicinal qualities. Though they might not eat the cat meat, a soup paste made from cat is used to treat rheumatism.

In 1986, press attache Young Mo Ahn of the Korean embassy in Washington D.C. stated " Koreans have never made a practice of consuming cat meat. There is an old belief among the people that a benevolent spirit resides within cats. Therefore, to harm a cat would be to harm the spirit. Cats are kept by many households and restaurants in Korea to keep rodents under control, and are therefore highly valued. " According to other Koreans, many there have a disdain for cats and could not imagine eating them though they could imagine harming them.

The rough handling, crowded caging and slaughter in front of each other may be little different from the treatment of many food animals in the US and Europe, but the deliberately cruel methods used to make the meat more potent is unnecessary and are based on superstition.