Stray cats strut in Forbidden City
Print Edition
WALKING on tiptoe, Ping’an strolls through Beijing’s Forbidden City, his suspecting eyes glowing in the dark of the palace that once housed emperors and their concubines.
For years, the cat has roamed the empty lanes of the former royal palace after it has closed its doors to visitors, in search of his archenemy: mice.
Before being taken in by Shan Jixiang, curator of the Forbidden City, also called the Palace Museum, the animal lived a much harder life and had to forage for food in trash cans.
According to Ma Guoqing, director of the sanitation department of the Palace Museum, about 200 cats, including Ping’an, whose name translates as “safety” in Chinese, have in recent years found a home in the Forbidden City.
“Some of them might even be the descendants of royal pets, but most are strays taken in by the museum staff,” Ma said.
As a result, a policy originally aimed at bringing down the population growth of stray cats in the Forbidden City has also generated unexpected results by scaring away rats from the cultural relics.
Cats have long lived in the Forbidden City, which dates back more than 600 years. They were kept as royal pets, but now they have outlived their masters.
Though there is no official tally for the number of stray cats in Beijing, a Capital Animal Welfare Association report in 2010 said it was about 200,000. A female can have three or four litters a year and might add 100 cats to the stray population in its lifetime.
Stray cats have always been a headache for city authorities, who often receive complaints from residents about bad smells and nightly screeching.
For the conservators of the Forbidden City, the surge in the number of cats has also brought the challenge of how to treat them humanely while maintaining a clean environment.
Ma Guoqing said the museum started to realize the seriousness of the problem in 2009, when strays in large numbers were seen skulking through the yard and on the walls.
“The presence of cats could pose a threat to visitors, and their excrement is definitely an eyesore,” Ma said.
A special program began in 2009 to take care of the cats. It follows the trap-neuter-return principle, a method of humanely trapping unaltered stray cats, spaying or neutering them, and returning them to the location where they were collected, Gao Haiying, who works for an animal protection group, said.
Chinese people don’t have a tradition of neutering their pets as they think it is better for the animals, but that’s led to an increase in the number of abandoned pets, he said.
Ma said 181 cats in the Forbidden City have been neutered in the past five years and their number is now steady. He said he even has a ledger in which he records all “personal information” about the cats: names, pregnancy status, neutering operation type and the amount of money spent on the operation.
Money spent on the program was not for naught, however. The cats have played an important role in safeguarding precious antiques, Ma said.
“They keep away the rats and we’ve never found any damage to relics caused by cat claws.”
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