(CN) CRUEL PRACTICES

[Guest guest]

South China Morning Post

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

Animals suffer, too. It's time the Chinese learned that

by PETER LI

 

The outbreak of Sars in Guangdong did not happen by chance. Strong

evidence points to a connection between culinary practices involving wild

animals in the province and the spread of Sars.

 

Such culinary practices exist throughout China. Guangdong's food

subculture, however, has taken this habit to an extreme. The consumption of

wild animals and their exploitation for other purposes are a huge business

in the province. In Guangzhou, any sympathy for animals is suffocated by a

reckless drive for profit.

 

 

According to the Hong Kong-based Animals Asia Foundation

(www.animalsasia.org), truckloads of wild animals and pets are shipped to

Guangzhou from all directions on the way to local restaurants. Some dogs and

cats, on the road for up to 72 hours without food or water, are dying as

they arrive in Guangdong. Restaurants in the province have killed as many as

10,000 cats a day to cater to the taste of their Cantonese customers. In

thousands of markets, animals seriously injured in the wild by debilitating

traps have been a common sight.

 

Politics lies behind this lack of compassion. In the none-too-distant

past, pet ownership was perceived in ideological terms as part of a

" decadent bourgeois lifestyle " that eroded the fighting spirit of

revolutionary society.

 

The year 1958 witnessed an unprecedented campaign against animals,

when Mao Zedong decreed that China's sparrow population should be

exterminated. He reasoned that sparrows were pests because they consumed

grain and thus reduced cereal production. So, they deserved to die. How? He

launched a mass " kill the sparrows " movement. The entire society

participated in a frantic killing spree, with truckloads of dead sparrows

displayed by the government in Tiananmen Square.

 

Like many other such ideological campaigns, the sparrow-killing

movement was a disaster on all counts. In the absence of sparrows, their

natural enemies - China's insect population - exploded the next year, with

ruinous effects on the grain harvest. Grain production continued to fall.

Some 30 to 40 million peasants perished in humanity's worst policy-induced

famine.

 

Another state-sanctioned mass campaign ordered the killing of dogs.

But it was not just dogs and their owners that suffered.

 

The campaign fanned the violence of the Chinese youth during the

Cultural Revolution.

 

A society that discourages compassion for the defenceless and promotes

cruelty to animals, encourages violence almost by definition. No wonder the

Red Guards never hesitated to use brutal tactics on so-called " class

enemies " .

 

Teenagers were seen disemboweling live cats on the street. In

northeast China, poachers are still setting illegal traps that, for example,

caused the slow and agonising death of a Siberian tiger in the winter of

2001.

 

Liu Hai-yang, a student at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University,

became briefly famous last summer for an experiment in which he poured

damaging chemicals on three trusting bears at Beijing zoo.

 

Most shocking of all, perhaps, is the common culinary practice of

chopping off the paws of live bears, because the paws of dead bears are said

to be less appetising.

 

Recently, pet owners have been abandoning their dogs and cats, fearful

that the animals may be carrying the Sars virus.

 

When Deng Xiaoping initiated China's economic reforms in the late

1970s, making it ideologically correct to seek wealth, one side-effect was

an explosion in the wild animal industry.

 

Hundreds of bear farms have been set up, and across China about 8,000

bears are kept in iron cages for the daily extraction of bile from an open

wound in their stomachs. For years, the practice was praised by the

government as a " brilliant innovation " , producing revenue from bile exports

and for pharmaceutical companies. Most people are blind to the cruelty.

 

Even though Sars has highlighted the fact that the eating of wild

animals is hazardous to public health, local officials have yet to change

their mindset in viewing animals as easy targets.

 

Like the sparrow-killing campaign, some local authorities have issued

orders to kill pets. This did not solve anything, and the orders were

imposed more for reasons of bureaucratic self-protection than for public

health.

 

Currently, Guangdong is taking steps to outlaw the trade and

consumption of wild animals. Is it not time for authorities to seize the

opportunity to foster a sense of concern for the other creatures that share

the planet with us?

 

Peter Li is an assistant professor of political science at the

University of Houston-Downtown. lipj