1115.org

Here’s what passes for family entertainment in China these days:

The smiling children giggled as they patted the young goat on its head and tickled it behind the ears. Some of the more boisterous ones tried to clamber onto the animal’s back but were soon shaken off with a quick wiggle of its bottom.

It could have been a happy scene from a family zoo anywhere in the world but for what happened next.

A man hoisted up the goat and nonchalantly threw it over a wall into a pit full of hungry lions. The poor goat tried to run for its life, but it didn’t stand a chance. The lions quickly surrounded it and started tearing at its flesh.

“Oohs” and “aahs” filled the air as the children watched the goat being ripped limb from limb. Some started to clap silently with a look of wonder in their eyes.

The scenes witnessed at Badaltearing Safari Park in China are rapidly becoming a normal day out for many Chinese families.

Baying crowds now gather in zoos across the country to watch animals being torn to pieces by lions and tigers.

It actually gets a little worse:

The zoo also encourages visitors to “fish” for lions using live chickens as bait. For just £2, giggling visitors tie terrified chickens onto bamboo rods and dangle them in front of the lions, just as a cat owner might tease their pet with a toy.

It’s almost a form of child abuse,” says Carol McKenna of the OneVoice animal welfare group. “The cruelty of Chinese zoos is disgusting, but think of the impact on the children watching it. What kind of future is there for China if its children think this kind of cruelty is normal?

These, of course, are the children who will be China’s leaders tomorrow, holding our economic testicles in their hands as they perform for the baying circus of domestic public opinion.

At one level, it may seem strange to single out animal abuse for criticism when the trampling of basic human rights is endemic to the very structure of Chinese society, when people are routinely tossed into jail for daring to demand basic freedoms.

However, first of all, human rights abuses are widely known and roundly condemned by those who can afford to roundly condemn a country that holds most of the rest of the world’s economies by their testicles. The animal abuse is not yet widely known, and surely deserves to be?

Secondly, even apart from economic blackmail, it is politically problematic for other countries to criticize China’s treatment of dissidents and activists. Because China invariably turns around and foams at the mouth over interference in its domestic political affairs. And the civilized nations of the world agreed long ago that it was perfectly okay to deny your citizens inalienable human rights, as long as nobody is openly killed in the streets (or not more than once a generation, maybe), and there’s no incontrovertible evidence of genocide or ethnic cleansing or rape and mutilation and slaughter.

But with respect to the kind of animal abuse we’re talking about here, there are surely no political ramifications to, say, America, or the European Union, from roundly condemning the abuse?

So why are we not denouncing China for this? Perhaps it’s only because the issue has not yet been politicized in the U.S.?

And surely the state of the Democratic and Republication presidential contests is such as to invite ready politicization? If I were an animal activist looking to make this a high-profile issue, I would arrange for the Romneys and McCains and Huckabees of this world, the Clintons and Edwardses and Obamas, to be asked whether they denounce now, and would denounce again as president, China’s Roman circus zoo policies.

I would try to arrange for the question to be asked by cute little girls in pigtails, while TV cameras just happen to be running.