A couple of days ago it was reported that a cull of hamsters was underway in Hong Kong after several had been found to have Covid. Since Hong Kong is essentially Covid-free (cases well under a hundred per day), the hamsters appear to have arrived pre-infected.
Arrived, you say? Yes, it appears the hamsters arrived as a consignment from the Netherands.
There is now local action to (illegally) rescue / rehouse said (cute) rodents.
One of my pledges was not to get all social-media about ephemeral issues of the moment, and so I would calmly like to refer the reader to some salient implications of these two things.
Hong Kong imports hamsters from the Netherlands.
Presumably this is because it makes monetary sense to do so, rather than because there is some prohibition on hamster breeding in Hong Kong, or nearby mainland China, or Vietnam, or Korea, or perhaps the Philipines (I shall delicately set aside Taiwan), all of which are somewhat closer than the Netherlands. Unlike the happy chappies rowing into Kowloon Bay above, I assume these lucky (now unlucky) furries flew-in from Schiphol, though the alternative of a sea journey of such length seems only barely less plausible. Pogo stick pehaps? Roller skates?
I file this here as an observation on the madness of global capitalism and its relation to the climate: we really are flying hamsters around the world because somehow it ‘makes sense’ to do so.
Don’t mess with hamsters
One of the guiding rules of the internet and subject of an expletively titled docu-drama, is that whatever one does, it is unacceptable to harm cute cats online. By extension, it appears that a government can, ooooh, set up a network of genocidally intensioned labour camps, imprison any political dissenters and close down the remnants of the free press, and provoke only a resigned and powerless shrug from the rest of the world. Start killing hamsters though, and well, suddenly folk have a backbone. I suppose it’s the novelty.
Yes, of course I felt sorry for the children having their pet taken away to be ‘humanely destroyed’: who wouldn’t? but I don’t suppose any imprisoned students had family who cared too much about their being forcibly taken away.
I’m sorry to be such an old misery on this one. To move on from bewildered outrage, I will reflect only on the capacity for people as a whole – as humanity – to live in multiple unrealities at the same time. Perhaps it’s because we only see what we can bear to see, or only that which it might plausibly be in our gift to do something about. Or that we really care more about a pet rodent than the person who made our phone or sewed our dress. Or their children or their future, becasue that would involve some cost to ourselves.
