The Star, Malaysia : China's Wild Game Business

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

China's Wild Game Business - Chow down

By DOUG YOUNG and SHASHA DAI

SARS has disrupted China’s wild game business and may be doing for wild animals what wildlife protection advocates have been unable to do for years, DOUG YOUNG and SHASHA DAI report.

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, customers thronged the place in search of exotic flavours, textures and medicinal effects.

Now, after wide publicity over reports SARS may have leapt 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,” says a waitress at the Big Nose. “The place is usually packed at lunch and dinner.”

The civet cat, a 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 complexion.

Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong, 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 Xin Yuan, 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 800 million yuan (RM380mil).

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.

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

“I haven’t eaten the civet since the SARS outbreak,” says 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,” says Xu Hongfa, China coordinator of TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring network.

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 says.

“If that can be stopped, then that’s a wonderful thing for animals and SARS has given that window of opportunity.” – Reuters