Crisscross News: “Animal cruelty rife in Japan”

Earlier this week, Crisscross News published this article claiming that animal cruelty is on the rise in Japan. Here’s an excerpt:

There is the case, for example, of a 38-year-old Kawasaki man who strangled a stray cat in a Tokyo Park and then, having evidently derived satisfaction from that, got hold of another stray, taped it till it couldn’t move, stuffed it into a plastic bag, and left it to starve to death in his car.

A 26-year-old Fukuoka man took a stray cat home, bound its legs and cut it up with scissors, providing live Internet coverage of the animal’s agony for the benefit of 2-Channel fans who enjoy that sort of thing.

Both men ended up in court. Both were given six-month suspended sentences in June.

The sentences were imposed under the Animal Protection Act of 2000, which provides for up to a year’s imprisonment and fines of up to 1 million yen for cruelty to animals. “And yet,” observes Weekly Playboy, “the cruelty continues unabated.”

Why should that be?

For Yuri Shirai of the Japan Pet Society, the people who have almost as much to answer for as the perpetrators are pet owners who grow tired of their four-legged charges and simply abandon them.

A dramatic case in point occurred in Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture. A 42-year-old woman disappeared from her rented house in March. In June, 22 dead cats were found in the house. Subsequently arrested, the woman reportedly told police, “The cats were cute, but there were so many of them I couldn’t take care of them any longer.”

“There are an alarming number of abandoned cats around,” Shirai observes.

Starvation is one danger. Crossing paths with stressed, troubled or sadistic humans is another.

“In Japan,” says Shirai, “there is less awareness than elsewhere of the connection between cruelty to animals and crimes against children and other weak members of society.”

Weekly Playboy encounters a Gunma Prefecture man who devotes his own time and money to rescuing strays from a neighborhood park, taking them to the vet for shots and seeking homes for them. “Once,” he explains,” I saw a man turn his dog loose on a stray cat. The man was never caught. It made me want to do what I can for the cats in this park.”

We come in the end to the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Is companionship across the species barrier sustainable in an urban setting? If so, how close is it meant to be? Are the Japanese, amid an aging population, a scarcity of children and increasing social isolation, investing more affection in their pets than is healthy for either party in the relationship, thus provoking a backlash reflected in the escalating cruelty?

The answers are not obvious, but Weekly Playboy offers us a statistic with which there is no arguing: In 2004 nationwide, 243,850 cats were put to sleep by local governments. That’s about 668 cats a day.

The final conclusion seemed a bit strange. The aging population and its social effects on Japan are causing a backlash against pets? Given the evidence presented in the article, it’s hard to know whether or not animal cruelty is actually on the rise in Japan. Certainly I’ve seen quite a lot of stray cats in my time in Japan (I had never seen a stray cat during the 21 years of my life I lived in America). It’s also worth noting that in the United States, where spaying/neutering pets is pretty common, animal shelters put 3 to 4 million dogs and cats to sleep a year. I guess America has been overtaken by a huge wave of animal cruelty? I’m sure you can find some Animal rights activists in America who agree.

In a related story, groups are calling upon dolphin-lovers to protest in front of Japanese embassies and consulates in their respective nations on September 20th. The protests are meant to prevent the government-sanctioned slaughter of thousands of dolphins by Japanese fishermen, which will happen in October.