Results tagged “cats”

• The WSJ has a summary of the pajama controversy in the wake of Expo city "improvements". Our take: Who cares? Let Shanghai people wear their damn pajamas. It'll finally lend some authenticity to this whole show already. [WSJ]
• Oh joy of joys! The Haunted House of Suzhou Creek: Shanghai Nightmare is staying open for 8 days past Halloween. In case you wanted to extend the fun. [ChinaTravel]
• Adam Minter's had quite a week. First he ran into one of the most honestly named Shanghai restaurants we've ever seen pictures of: Hong Kong Gimmick. [Shanghai Scrap]

This week's Adoptable Pet from Second Chance Animal Aid, Shanghaiist's favorite adopted animal charity.

Yesterday night, after enjoying a drink at one of our favorite pubs, we were strolling home along Fuxing Lu in the Luwan district. At one o' clock the streets were empty except for the odd beggar or 串-seller. It was then we noticed a middle aged man in a white shirt who seemed to be fiddling with something like a cage. As we came closer we saw that it was indeed a cage, about 30cm high and around 50cm long. Inside the cage, two small, live sparrows (or some similar kind of bird) were hung upside down from the wire ceiling.

A group of cat lovers saved over 300 furry friends last night from being sold to restaurants in Guangdong Province after rescuing them from a cat dealer this weekend.

Apparently one time just wasn't enough for Shanghai's cat crazy audience, because Andrew Lloyd Weber's super popular show about felines doing feline things is making its return trip to the city this September.

What’s causing these wing-like appendages is still a mystery, but theories have been aplenty since the first incidence of winged cats appeared in Sichuan. Cat owners there reasoned that the province's hot summer spell and a stressful love life for their felines were causing wings to appear. Scientists were not convinced.

    

This week's Adoptable Pet from Second Chance Animal Aid, Shanghaiist's favorite adopted animal charity.

This weekend, support both your local amateur artists and Shanghai's favorite pet charity with a fun lunch at Café DuMonde 咖啡杜梦in Pudong. Second Chance Animal Aid (SCAA) will be holding the awards ceremony for their art contest there on Saturday, April 25.

This week's Adoptable Pet from Second Chance Animal Aid, Shanghaiist's favorite adopted animal charity.

Of all the things to take issue with about the streets of Shanghai, it seems like the worst nuisance to Shanghai families are “pets piddling in public,” according to Shanghai Daily. Yep, pets letting loose their bowels ranked higher than illegal street vendors, spitting, graffiti and noise. As one university student put it, “Letting pets urinate or defecate in public deprives the animals of self-respect. A true animal lover wouldn't allow that to happen.” We don't know about that - our pets never seemed to mind. And besides, don't people let their kids do that here?

Second Chance Animal Aid, that awesome organization that helps stray or abandoned pets find loving homes in Shanghai needs you... to get creative! They're calling all artists - of any age - to submit work for the 2009 SCAA Art Contest.

This week's Adoptable Pet from Second Chance Animal Aid, Shanghaiist's favorite adopted animal charity.

More photos on the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site (and here).

About 800 cats escaped the Guangdong dinner tables this weekend, as activists from Shanghai Animal Protection Association freed them from "cat dealers" in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province. The animals had been locked in small bamboo cages, stacked in a truck, and were to be transported to Guangdong. According to an activist quoted in the Shanghai Daily, about 1500 cats were on the truck, but activists only managed to release around 800 of them.

Several tomcats in Sichuan province have started to develop fur-covered wings and while their owners have attributed the strange growth to the hot summer spell and stress from having too many female cats desiring to mate with them (!), scientists think otherwise. The cats have caused a sensation, attracting large crowds of people to behold the unusual sight. More from The Telegraph:

Although the growths appear fluffy, they contain bone. But veterinary experts say that despite the hard inner core, the flaps do not harm the cat's quality of life or safety.

Continue reading "Pussies will soon fly in Sichuan province"

This week's Adoptable Pet from Second Chance Animal Aid, Shanghaiist's adopted animal charity. From the SCAA:

Well...after a day of bloating ourselves on turkey and pumpkin pie (sorry Shanghaiist is American and assumes that everyone else wants to be one) the perfect cure is a night of live music. Lucky for us Convenience Store, one of Beijing's longest lasting and most reputable Brit-pop bands, is going to be playing out at Live Bar tonight. Shanghaiist has waited along time to see this band, in the past we were busy or too...

This week's Adoptable Pet from Second Chance Animal Aid, Shanghaiist's adopted animal charity. From the SCAA:

Shanghaiist is going to give Senator Clinton the benefit of the doubt -- that she actually knows better but is just being the politician that everybody expects her to be. But the following infuriatingly pandering comment puts Senator Clinton right up there with the lovely Senator Schumer on this Shanghaiist's "too-political-for-America's-own-good" list:

"We have to have tougher standards on what they import into this country," she said. I don't want to eat bad food from China or have my children having toys that are going to get them sick," said Clinton.

Even as the majority of the domestic and international press crowned Inner Mongolia native and Shanghai resident Duo Zirong for her courage to stop the truck and "save" 800 cats from the food trade on July 7, dissenting voices have been raised with regards to the character of this women. And some have gone so far as to call her — as we have heard recently from those involved in various animal rescue organizations — more of a psychopath hoarder than a cat saviour.

This week's Adoptable Pet from Second Chance Animal Aid, Shanghaiist's adopted animal charity. From the SCAA:

Forget Ratatouille, this is the real thing: an estimated 2 billion field mice are on the run in the areas surrounding Dongting Lake (洞庭湖) in Hunan province. The mass migration was caused by the flooding of the Yangtze River in late June. Since then, as you can see from the news report in the video, people have been busy trying to control the mice by both erecting walls and barriers and also by trying to kill them. However, according to reports they've only managed to exterminate 2.25 million of them (or 90 tons of mice), a mere 1/1000 of the total.

Last Friday, over 800 cats were rescued in Shanghai's Xinzhuang area, where they were about to be shipped to Guangzhou to meet their maker. However, local cat lovers here in Shanghai informed the police, resulting in a stand-off between the cat-lovers and the cat meat shippers that lasted several hours. The cat meat shippers claimed that the cats were from a legit cat farm in Anhui province, and had documents to prove it; the cat-lovers claim these were forged. The Chinese reports mention that some of the cats were quite dirty while others had collars, which in their eyes proved that the cats were captured. In the end, word of the situation spread through the internet and the stand-off, which started around 10pm and lasted until the wee hours of the night, was resolved with the cat-lovers collecting around 10,000 RMB and buying the freedom of the cats. Read the Chinese reports and take a look at some pictures here and here.

Plastic pipes had been forced down the pigs' throats and villagers had pumped each 100 kilogram pig with 20 kilograms of wastewater... Paperwork found at site showed the pigs were headed for one of the city's top slaughterhouses and stamps on their ears indicated that they had already been through quarantine and inspection, the [Beijing Morning Post] said.

Elsewhere - Indian-born billionaire Lakshmi Mittal - the fifth richest man in the world - has emerged as a contender to buy Birmingham, while Arsenal faces a takeover bid from an Arab tycoon Mohammed Al Hashimi who was a partner in a £450million bid to buy Liverpool. In the meanwhile, ousted billionaire Thai premier Thaksin Shinawatra, is reportedly poised to buy English football's Manchester City, although the Bank of Thailand said it has not received a money transfer request from Thaksin. Are Asians going to take over the English Premier League someday?

On Friday night, we set out to rub shoulders with Shanghai's glitterati, nouveau riche, assorted celebrities, politicians, and captains of industry at the Millionaire Fair, where we watched them splurge their hard-earned, unearned, or ill-gotten gains on some of the priciest merchandise in the known universe. There were stretch hummers, Scotch whiskey, French wines, US$350,000 diamond necklaces, and quoting from the New York Times, "Blüthner pianos, private islands off the coast of Dubai, beluga-size speedboats, snub-nosed sports cars. It is a woozy carnival of excess, with Cuervo cocktail shakers hurtling through the air and vaguely Soviet floor shows to delight or repulse, depending on how you like your entertainment served."

The China Daily recently reported that we are soon to see the opening of The Absolut Icebar, billed as Asia's first ice bar. The concept is that there's a lot of ice and ice sculptures, and it's really cold inside. Absolut says that the ice being used isn't just any old ice, but the pure stuff from the Torne River in Sweden.

Of course you do. That's why you should head on down to Zapata's (yes, Zapata's) tonight for Second Chance Animal Aid's Gala Holiday Party. It starts at 6:30 pm and a 100 kuai entrance ticket gets you two drinks, food and a raffle ticket. There is a separate raffle for a cool Chang Jiang sidecar motorcycle (see video ... just like the the one Christopher St. Cavish rode on his charity ride through China). You can also inquire about how you can adopt one of the SCAA's wonderful dogs and cats (sorry, this guy and this guy are both taken ... by us). Here's what we got in our email this morning from the SCAA:

Many of you might have read our post regarding the horrible mass-slaughter of dogs in August. Sadly, it seems we could be experiencing the third wave of the canine cull, based on this Economic Daily report (in Chinese) that says five major cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou and Wuhan are going to address "dog problems".