This may be why your mother told you never to air your dirty laundry in public: There's an uproar in Beijing over the bodies of 6 dead cats hanging on a clothesline outside Macro-Union Pharmaceutical.
Someone posted a picture of the scene on Weibo, a major Chinese microblogging service akin to Twitter (which is banned in China), and the complaints rolled in. Everybody does it, was Macro-Union's response.
The company issued a statement that said research using cats is necessary in finding treatments for allergies such as, we presume, to cats. The firm bought the already-dead cats from a research supplier, it said, and dried them in the sun before removing the hair and dander so they can be searched for allergens.
Nonetheless, the cats were removed from the clothesline after the photo was circulated on Weibo, leading to complaints of animal abuse and even that it was inhumane just to display them.
Medical experts contacted by CRIEnglish News agreed with Macro-Union that drying cat bodies was normal in pharmaceutical research. But they said the company should not have let the general public see its experimental procedures.
- here's the story from CRIEnglish News