I’m one of those people who cries when I watch the Olympics. I get all choked up when I see people representing their countries on the medal stands when their flags are raised and their national anthems play. The opening ceremonies also touch me for what they represent—all nations coming together in peace. That’s the Olympic dream that has made an imprint on my imagination since childhood.

You can imagine with what outrage and grief I read a report in the Daily Mail (United Kingdom) on the round-up, caging and killing of cats in a pre-Olympic effort to clean up the city to make it more pleasant for tourists. To learn that many of these cats were once people''''s pets makes it even more shocking.

My heart breaks especially for the cats that once were pets. Abandonment crushes the spirit of animals even more, I think, than death. So these abandoned pets refuse to eat or drink. They just wait to die. Not even humanely, apparently. The government refuses to give lethal injections to sick cats, so their suffering is prolonged in what must be an agonizing death.

Chinese animal welfare groups are doing everything they can to help these poor cats, but they fear retaliation from authorities.

When I think of this and all the other human rights violations, such as female infanticide and abandonment, I wonder what the Olympic Committee was thinking to allow these games to occur in China.

“Every living creature deserves dignity,” I wrote on an online petition as the 1,753rd signature. “Please have a reverence for life and stop killing these innocent cats, or this year''''s Olympic Games are a pretense and do not represent what the Olympic dream stands for.” I meant every word of it.

If you would like to sign the petition, click here.

To read the Daily Mail’s full coverage, click here.