Mr Ziang Hong, owner of the Peking Palace in Sudbury Road, Coventry, has come to the aid of Mary Bale, who is now in hiding at an undisclosed location after being caught stuffing a cat in a dustbin last week.

“Instead of throwing away good food like that in the bins, she can bring the cats to my takeaway restaurant. We need someone like her to get more quality meat. The English never know the difference between the cat meat and chicken plus they’re usually drunk out of their minds when they eat it anyway. We’ve been doing it for years, but she really got my eye, she’s an expert cat napper for sure. I’ll pay her good wages to get us some good meat we sell to the English morons. Once we put my special Kung Pao sauce and bucketloads of MSG, it’s f*cking delicious,” Mr Hong told the Coventry Echo.

In China, cats and dogs are regularly eaten, and are seen as a staple diet for many Chinese people. A popular dish named Dragon, Phoenix, Tiger contains the ingredients of snake, chicken and cat and is supposed to be an especially powerful agent to restore youth and vigour. In the UK, however, it is frowned upon, even though most Chinese restaurants regularly serve up the delicacy from illegally captured household pets. Cats are also a source of cheap meat for the restaurants who like to keep overheads low and profits high.

“It could be pork, it could be chicken, it could be dog or cat. Just eat up your Chow mein and don’t think about that,” Elvis Kimble, 24, out on a Friday night in a Newcastle Chinese restaurant quipped as he tucked into a number 62 with egg fried rice.