Thousands of seized cats feared buried alive in Vietnam

Vietnamese authorities have buried thousands of seized cats -- many believed to have been alive at the time -- after the felines were smuggled from China to feed the nation's illegal cat meat trade.
A truck containing three tons of live cats crammed into bamboo crates was impounded last yesterday in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi, with police initially undecided how to deal with the animals.
But today a police officer told AFP they had been buried in accordance with Vietnamese law on smuggled goods.
"The cats were from China, with no official origin papers and no quarantine," a policeman from the Dong Da district environmental police said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"Several of them had died, there was a terrible smell that could affect the environment and carried risks of future diseases," he said.
"Therefore, we culled them by burying them," he said, declining to confirm how many were alive at the time of burial.

Animal protection groups, who pleaded in vain for the cats to be spared, fear many of the creatures were alive when they were buried.
Other smuggled animals, including chickens, are routinely disposed of in a similar way.
The Asian Canine Protection Alliance, a regional coalition of animal rights groups, said it had heard "inhumane stories as to how the (cats) may have been destroyed."

"Our request for any visual evidence of their fate has been denied," the group said in a statement today, calling for the "practice of inhumane killing of trafficked animals," to be stopped.
Photographs of the cats crammed into dozens of bamboo crates stacked on top of one another prompted widespread calls for the felines' lives to be spared.