Coronavirus: in China, the pandemic payoff has been good for pets, with interest in them increasing
- During lockdown, cats and dogs became important players online, with the number of live-stream pet shows surging 375 per cent
- Pet owners also boosted online sales of pet products, which showed ‘accelerated growth’ this year despite Covid-19, according to one report
When Celia Zhang, an employee at a Beijing internet company, left the city for her hometown in the central province of Hubei in mid-January, she did not expect to be trapped there by a pandemic – or that she would be separated from her cat, Yahaha, for three months.
While Hubei, epicentre of the first coronavirus outbreak, was under lockdown, Zhang, 27, scrambled to order cat food from e-commerce platforms, sought help from friends and kind strangers via social media and frequently checked on Yahaha, who had just finished a sterilisation operation, through a video camera in her Beijing flat.
“I couldn’t help weeping when I saw Yahaha hid herself sullenly and did not touch food for days,” Zhang said, “It came to me she was so important in my life and I decided to indulge her when I’m back.”
At the end of January, Zhang’s roommate managed to return to Beijing from the western province of Shaanxi where lockdown measures were less stringent. As Zhang splurged online for Yahaha – whom she named after magic seeds in a Japanese video game – the roommate received the cat foods, toys and accessories, from balls to cardboard boxes to a drinking fountain.
Zhang returned in mid-April. She was excited to see Yahaha, but to her disappointment, Yahaha did not act intimately as before. Yahaha did not pay much attention when Zhang opened the door with a trembling hand. It took the cat a couple of months to get familiar with her again.
