SARS Disrupts China's Wild Game Business
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
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
