Communists have no new ideas. Just old bad ones that they try to rebrand.
During Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the Communist Chinese regime launched the Four Pests campaign to wipe out flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows.
None of this was a particularly good idea. You don’t have to be a militant environmentalist to realize that there’s a difference between pest control and attempts at outright elimination that will wreck the ecology.
Mao’s efforts helped lead to a massive famine.
About all you can say about the Communist regime’s effort to kill all the hamsters in Hong Kong is that it probably won’t lead to a mass famine.
Hong Kong authorities said Tuesday that they will kill about 2,000 small animals, including hamsters, after several tested positive for the coronavirus at a pet store where an employee was also infected.
The pet shop employee tested positive for the delta variant on Monday, and several hamsters imported from the Netherlands at the store tested positive as well.
“We cannot exclude the possibility that the shopkeeper was in fact actually infected from the hamsters,” said Edwin Tsui, a controller at the Centre for Health Protection.
Or the possibility that Communism spreads COVID. There’s more evidence for Communists spreading COVID than there is of hamsters spreading the virus.
Commies being commies, this quickly escalated to the usual dystopian nightmare of a totalitarian surveillance state.
Hong Kong police will deal with pet lovers who try to stop people giving up their hamsters to be put down, or who offer to care for abandoned hamsters, authorities said, after they ordered a cull of the cuddly rodents to curb the coronavirus.
Meanwhile, people are doing just that.
Ken Chow, a 37-year-old jobs broker, already had four hamsters in his 150-square-foot apartment when the government announced it was embarking on a massive cull of the tiny pets in an effort to curb a Covid-19 outbreak.
Then a neighbor contacted him through a hamster-rescue Facebook group. One of the neighbor’s family members works at a pet shop and they were worried that authorities might come looking for their five hamsters. Mr. Chow agreed to help. Now he is harboring nine furry fugitives.
“Humans can protest, but animals can’t help themselves when they are in trouble,” he said.
Hong Kong already resembles a blue lockdown city.
Ridicule was swift, with hamster memes and emojis quickly multiplying on social media. Parents can be forgiven for thinking they are living through a Kafkaesque nightmare. Kindergartens and primary schools are already closed, and playgrounds roped off, as the government hews to its zero-Covid policy and tries to contain an outbreak of the omicron strain. Some parents now face the task of telling their little ones why a pet has to be dispatched to the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department for some “humane treatment,” as one official described it.
At least our authorities aren’t mass killing pets. Yet. Considering their imitation of China in other virus control policies, that may not be far behind.
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