QWhat wouldn’t you do for your pet? In Hong Kong, for several weeks, several private jets have left the city, taking on board curious passengers. Faced with the “zero Covid” policy led by China, which does not hesitate to confiscate – and sometimes slaughter – contaminated animals or animals belonging to contaminated people, wealthy inhabitants spend lavishly to leave the place in the company of their pet.
And to achieve this, it has almost become mandatory to use private aviation. Chinese health policy obliges, embarking an animal on a commercial flight has become almost impossible, narrates the Courrier international. “We are overwhelmed with requests to evacuate pets from Hong Kong,” said Olga Radlynska, director of Top Stars airline.
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$22,000 each way
Inevitably, such exfiltrations are only accessible to the richest inhabitants of Hong Kong: on average, it takes “about 22,000 dollars” to leave the area in the company of a cat, a dog or a rodent. But nothing is too expensive for anyone who wants to save their pet’s life, and the threat is real. Thus, on January 19, the Hong Kong government decided to slaughter some 2,000 small animals, including hamsters and rabbits.
A brutal policy that struggles to justify itself, notes researcher Vanessa Barrs, head of the veterinary department at the University of Hong Kong: since January 2020, “there has been no confirmed case of transmission of Covid- 19 from a domestic animal to a human”.
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Moreover, the animals thus exfiltrated do not leave alone, since Hong Kong’s health policy has also caused many inhabitants to flee. In the summer of 2021, underlines South China, nearly 90,000 inhabitants had already left the territory, tired of the extreme harshness of local measures. A wave of departures which has amplified in recent months: since 2021, the Hong Kong territory has lost 1.2% of its population.