On the night of February 22nd, a man left a dead cat in the parking lot of Mad Butcher Meat Company, an Asian-American owned butcher shop in Sacramento, California. The shop shared the news on social media yesterday, asking for help in identifying the man, who was caught on the store’s security footage prior to carrying out the heinous act.

As reported by FOX40, the man first made a cash purchase inside the store, which allowed for the security footage to be taken. After leaving the store, the man proceeded to pull a box out of his pick-up truck and dump it in the parking lot of the shop. Inside the box was a dead, mutilated cat.

Kelly Shum, the owner of the butcher shop, told FOX40 how it’s been difficult to run the business in the past year due to increases in anti-Asian sentiment and hate crimes that have affected Asian-American communities all across the nation.

Shum said, “Yeah, and it’s always something about like, ‘You guys are dirty or you’re diseased.’ And we get calls all the time like, ‘Oh, do you guys sell bat soup?’ I feel like I have to work, like forty times as hard to be seen as on the same level as the other butcher shops in the area. So, we increased our social media presence, we hired a security guard who you see out front now. Like, that’s why. Most butcher shops, when you go in, you don’t see a security guard at the very front.”

Shum also expressed her past reluctance to speak out about acts of discrimination, but she ultimately decided that she couldn’t keep this incident to herself, “I don’t think I can keep doing what I’ve been doing for the last year, which is keep my head down and try not to be public that we’re Chinese. And I don’t want to feel not proud of my culture, and I don’t want to not feel proud of the work that we do here because I am proud of the work that we do here. I’m proud of everyone that works here and I’m proud of the staff that we have and I’m proud of everything that we have here.”

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