SARS Disrupts China's Wild Game Business

[Guest guest]

SARS Disrupts China's Wild Game Business

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CHINA: June 23, 2003

 

 

SHENZHEN - It's summertime in the south China boomtown of Shenzhen, but the

living is hardly easy for the Big Nose.

 

 

 

One of the city's top wild game restaurants, it was empty during a recent

lunch hour, shunned by once eager customers.

 

Just weeks ago, they thronged the place in search of exotic flavors,

textures and medicinal effects.

 

Now, after wide publicity over reports SARS may have leaped from wild

animals to humans, they fear they might get the deadly flu-like disease as

well.

 

" There's been hardly any business for the last fortnight, " despite shelving

the regular menu and putting half the kitchen staff on unpaid leave, said a

waitress at the Big Nose.

 

" The place is usually packed at lunch and dinner, " she said in the city just

across the border from Hong Kong.

 

Shenzhen is in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, where the virus

causing Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome first appeared last November.

 

The scene is similar at Xinyuan, China's largest wild game market in

Guangzhou, the Guangdong capital.

 

Most of the cages that once held civet cats, snakes, owls, swans and other

exotic animals are empty. Not long ago, the market teemed with people buying

and selling more than 100 species of wild animals and boasted annual sales

of $100 million.

 

The reason it is now silent is the civet. This brown, furry creature with a

cat-like body, long tail and a weasel-like face is -- or was -- coveted by

those who believe its tender, juicy flesh will improve their complexions.

 

But the delicacy was taken off menus last month after a Hong Kong scientist

found civets carried a virus similar to that causing SARS. Scientists have

found similar viruses in bats, snakes and wild pigs.

 

But even before that, Chinese officials banned the capture and sale of

wildlife on protected lists in a bid to halt the spread of the disease.

 

TO EAT OR NOT TO EAT

 

Now, only the most diehard of wild game connoisseurs indulge.

 

" I haven't eaten the civet since the SARS outbreak, " said Zhou Linyan, a

Guangdong bank clerk who ate civet several times at the persuasion of her

friends.

 

" We eat seafood instead. It's safer. "

 

Southern Chinese in particular have a penchant for wild game, which they

believe has special nutritious and medicinal qualities not found in ordinary

food. Many believe snake blood improves eyesight and turtle meat boosts

libido.

 

Such exotic fare is so popular that one saying goes that folk in Guangdong

will eat anything with four legs except benches, anything with two wings

except an airplane.

 

Wild animals were kept, sold and butchered openly in markets like Xinyuan,

often in conditions that would be deemed unsanitary elsewhere.

 

Such practices may be linked to the spread of viruses like SARS, which some

believe jumped from animals to humans through the slaughter and preparation

of wild animals for food.

 

" This is a message that eating wild animals is dangerous and increases the

chance of contracting diseases, " said Xu Hongfa, China coordinator of

TRAFFIC, a British-based network monitoring wildlife trade.

 

Indeed, SARS may be doing for wild animals what wildlife protection

advocates have been unable to do for years in southern China.

 

Animal welfare advocate Animals Asia is encouraged by recent trends of empty

wild game markets and is lobbying Beijing to broaden the ban beyond

Guangdong to include all of China, said spokeswoman Annie Mather.

 

" Obviously, the animals that we have seen and witnessed in these markets

were in the most horrendous conditions, " she said. " If that can be stopped,

then that's a wonderful thing for animals and SARS has given that window of

opportunity. "

 

 

 

Story by Doug Young