Eating four million cats a year, why do Vietnamese people love cats so much? Few people on the mainland eat it. In everyone's impression, cats should be like this, pampered, and pets held in the palm of human hands. But in Vietnam's largest meat and cat trading market, thousands of cats are crammed into dirty cages every day, waiting to be brought to the table. Their eyes are sluggish, not knowing if they will be in a different place the next second.
In Vietnam, the price of each meat cat is as low as a few dozen, as high as more than two hundred. Driven by interests, some people have targeted stray cats on the side of the road, and even some people with bad intentions have directly stolen people's pet cats and sold them. And the traffickers in the meat cat market do not care what the origin of the cat is, whether it is sick or not, as long as it is a cat, it will be accepted as ordered. These poor cats have to go through a brutal process before they are brought to the table. Because there is a saying in Vietnam that if the cat is directly killed by a knife, the meat of the cat will be very ordinary, and the meat quality will be relatively more muscular.
Therefore, it is not cruel for the chef to drown the cat alive in the water before cooking, and even a few people will peel off the cat's fur when the cat is conscious. According to rough estimates, the price of each plate of cat meat is about three hundred and fifty to five hundred yuan in Vietnamese restaurants, and the customers who come to the restaurant every day are endless, and the owner of the restaurant looks at the bulging wallet and does not care whether it is cruel or not. Many animal protection groups at home and abroad have repeatedly denounced the Vietnamese cat meat market and even traveled to the local area to block the cat meat trade.
In China, according to Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica, tanuki meat is eaten, cat meat is not good, and it is not included in food, so it is rare to use. It is rumored that cat meat is sour, astringent, and the taste is poor, so it is said that Chinese has not loved to eat since ancient times, plus cats are more active, often lying day and night, it is difficult to large-scale captivity. Second, in the past, cats mostly fed on mice. Finally, most people in the mainland now treat cats and dogs as pets, which is an emotional sustenance, and they can't bear to kill these small animals. So why are the Vietnamese different from us? In order to survive, whether it is cat meat or dog meat, as long as it is meat, it can be eaten, which is much better than nibbling on tree bark and eating soil. When people face hunger, let alone cat meat, even the same kind of people may not let go. Gradually, the Vietnamese developed the habit of eating cat meat.
Then there are Vietnamese customs. In Vietnam, the cat is one of the zodiac signs, and in the eyes of the Vietnamese, the cat is a miniature version of the tiger. Vietnamese people believe that eating cat meat strengthens the body and even tonifies the kidneys and aphrodisiacs. And cats are agile, and they are equally agile in eating. Of course, there is no scientific basis for all this. In some parts of Vietnam, there is also a custom that you will be lucky to eat a cat for a month on the first day, and you will be lucky to eat a cat for a whole year. Saying that it happened in Vietnam is the misfortune of cats, how can we expect them to bring luck? Probably the last reason is that Vietnamese people's tastes are different from ours.
In the eyes of vietnamese, cat meat has high nutritional value, delicious taste, and special flavor. They've even developed more than two dozen ways to cook cat meat to suit the tastes of different groups. However, it is worth mentioning that because of the chaos of the Vietnamese cat market, many people will enter the hospital every year because they eat sick cats, and all we can do is to treat the small animals around us.
Finally, let's talk about why there are cats in the Vietnamese zodiac, can you believe it? Next year, 2023, will be the Year of the Cat. Of course, this is only available in Vietnam, is it strange to see here? Why is the year of the rabbit replaced by a cat? The reason why there is no cat on the mainland is because there were no cats in China at the time of the zodiac. Legend has it that as early as the Xia Dynasty, the zodiac was born. When it came to the Warring States and the pre-Qin dynasty, there was a clear written record of the zodiac signs.
There is no specific theory as to when the cat originated from Egypt and spread to China, but there is a theory that Xuanzang brought it back from India. According to rigorous research, although there were records of cats before the Han Dynasty, this cat was a wild cat. The domestic cats we see today evolved from the Egyptian desert cat. During the Eastern Han Dynasty, it spread from the Western Regions to China, but by this time the Zodiac had been completed, and it was also in the Han Dynasty that Vietnam was incorporated into the Chinese territory. It's just that at that time, Vietnam was still called Jiaotong, and the Chinese character Han culture and the zodiac signs spread to Vietnam at this time, and cats also spread to Vietnam.
However, the terrain of this part of Vietnam is narrow and long, three-quarters of which are mountainous and plateau, especially in the north, and the mountains are continuous, which is not suitable for rabbits to grow and reproduce. So the Vietnamese at that time couldn't understand what a rabbit was. In Chinese, the pronunciation of a rabbit is similar to the pronunciation of a cat, so the Vietnamese simply changed the rabbit to a cat, so ah, next year is the Year of the Vietnamese Cat.