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CATS - let's not get into cats. The China food-cat trade is too horrible.
Terrible scenes can be witnessed in most cities if you know where to look, especially in the South.
"The Ching Ping market in Guangzhou is a real vision of hell - a Dante's inferno of animals. Barking deer and wild boars crammed in cages with legs broken from the trap and hopeless fear in their eyes. coypus, turtles, snakes, cats crammed in cages being moved into another cage by being jabbed with metal spikes, dogs struggling inside sacks waiting for their turn to be displayed, hens in piles with the underneath ones already suffocated - hundreds of species suffering horrendously before one's eyes at the hands of humanity. All kinds of animals (from cats and dogs to poultry to civet cats to pangolins to you name it it's there) wounded and dying with broken limbs and guts hanging out, lying in heaps or being prodded with barbecue forks from place to place. Also plenty of bear gallbladders, tiger penises, bear paws, etc. - all on open display all day and every day. The hawkers know what they are doing is illegal and try to avoid being photographed - the surrounding crowd is supportive of the hawkers."
Ching Ping was cleaned up and most of its functions are now at the Zencha Road Chatou Poultry and Livestock Wholesale Market. There are still dreadful things to see but most of the illegalities are out of sight.

Cat Meat Ball Restaurant

Doctors sometimes keep cages of cats for selling to patients to make "healing" soups.

DOGS
If you are of a squeamish disposition and have already decided that you are against eating meat, please don't view the dog pages.
Please be warned that some of the scenes photographed are horrific.
To enter the food-dog pages, click on this picture of a chef preparing dog meat in Vietnam:

FISH
For more on FISH and FISHING - click on the Starfish:

see also "Sharks" below

PIGS
See:
Pig Health
Dragonwood Farm
Pig Farm

Piglets kicked into a pit and buried alive during a foot and mouth outbreak in Korea:
Korean Pig Slaughter

[Acknowledgements to Reuters for photograph - May 2002]

(photo courtesy of Medical Tribune)

Ducks in Korea being buried alive. (Reuters).

China Daily July 2000:
Chinese companies will open the largest facility of foie-gras in the world. The biggest plant in the world of foie-gras, a typically French specialty, will be constructed in southwest China, revealed this Friday by the China News Agency.
The farm, that will produce a thousand tons of pate per year, worth US$3 million, will be ready in four years near the region of Guangxi, which is one of the main producing regions of geese in China. The annual demand for the product was evaluated by the Xinhua Agency in the tens of thousand tons. Two Chinese companies are associated in order to finance this project.
Note: Advocates for Animals and WSPA have made a Joint Report on Foie Gras.
CIWF

RABBITS
See: RABBITS
House Rabbit Society

"We were in Qing Ping the other day and saw, amongst others, the most ghastly thing - rabbits literally stripped of their fur (after being plunged into boiling water) and "sitting" on the table still alive." Jill Robinson at Qing Ping Market, Guangzhou, February 1998.

Still living skinned rabbit in Lowu Market, South China:

Rabbits being fattened in the ladies' toilet in Chengdu:

"What the rabbit saw...."

Click here for Photos of Zigong Market - ducks, geese, rabbits, etc being slaughtered.

RATS - click here

Click here for other RODENTS

SHARKS
High demand for shark fin soup in Asia has led to some particularly repugnant fishing practices.
Horror Gallery
The Sharks' Pool

TURTLES
See: TURTLES
Turtles have their shells pulled off and steaks hacked from their back muscles. They continue to walk around the market stall until enough customers have bought enough steaks to cause fatal haemorrhage. Also they reach the market having been cramped into tight styrofoam containers with no food or water.

SLAUGHTERHOUSES
In the East you can see the horror of slaughter on the streets. In the West it goes on well hidden behind high walls.
A good book on this subject is SLAUGHTERHOUSE: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry, written by Gail A. Eisnitz and published by Prometheus Books. SLAUGHTERHOUSE is a gripping, horrifying page-turner of a book based on Eisnitz's tenacious investigation with extensive interviews with current and former slaughterhouse workers and disgusted USDA inspectors. She tells a story of unbelievable cruelty and corruption that begins with her investigation of a single meatpacking plant where somebody informs her about animals bled, skinned, and dismembered alive (a common industry practice, as the book demonstrates). As her investigation proceeds and more people come forward to testify, she traces the ever-widening circles of cruelty and corruption to the highest levels of government. The book is only available in hardcover ($29.95), but it can be ordered at a 30% discount from Amazon.com

Slaughterhouse by Gail A Eisnitz - Prometheus Books, New York, 1997; 310 pp; $29.95 hc
Review by Alex Hershaft, PhD, President, FARM
In the midst of our high-tech, ostentatious, hedonistic lifestyle, among the dazzling monuments to history, art, religion, and commerce, there are the 'black boxes.' These are the biomedical research laboratories, factory farms, and slaughterhouses -- faceless compounds where society conducts its dirty business of abusing and killing innocent, feeling beings. These are our Dachaus, our Buchenwalds, our Birkenaus. Like the good German burgers, we have a fair idea of what goes on there, but we don't want any reality checks. We rationalize that the killing has to be done and that it's done humanely. We fear that the truth would offend our sensibilities and perhaps force us to do something. It may even change our life.
Slaughterhouse by Gail Eisnitz of the Humane Farming Association is a gut-wrenching, chilling, yet carefully documented, expose of unspeakable torture and death in America's slaughterhouses. It explodes their popular image of obscure factories that turn dumb 'livestock' into sterile, cellophane-wrapped 'food' in the meat display case. The testimony of dozens of slaughterhouse workers and USDA inspectors pulls the curtain on abominable hellholes, where the last minutes of innocent, feeling, intelligent horses, cows, calves, pigs, and chickens are turned into interminable agony. And, yes, the book may well change your life. Here are some sample quotes (warning! extremely offensive material follows). The agony starts when the animals are hauled over long distances under extreme crowding and harsh temperatures. Here is an account from a worker assigned to unloading pigs "In the winter, some hogs come in all froze to the sides of the trucks. They tie a chain around them and jerk them off the walls of the truck, leave a chunk of hide and flesh behind. They might have a little bit of life left in them, but workers just throw them on the piles of dead ones. They'll die sooner or later." Once at the slaughterhouse, some animals are too injured to walk and others simply refuse to go quietly to their deaths. This is how the workers deal with it "The preferred method of handling a cripple is to beat him to death with a lead pipe before he gets into the chute... If you get a hog in a chute that's had the shit prodded out of him, and has a heart attack or refuses to move, you take a meat hook and hook it into his bunghole (anus)...and a lot of times the meat hook rips out of the bunghole. I've seen thighs completely ripped open. I've also seen intestines come out." And here is what awaits the animals on the kill floor. First, the testimony of a horse slaughterhouse worker "You move so fast you don't have time to wait till a horse bleeds out. You skin him as he bleeds. Sometimes a horse's nose is down in the blood, blowing bubbles, and he suffocates."
Then another worker, on cow slaughter "A lot of times the skinner finds a cow is still conscious when he slices the side of its head and it starts kicking wildly. If that happens, ... the skinner shoves a knife into the back of its head to cut the spinal cord." (This paralyzes the animal, but doesn't stop the pain of being skinned alive.) And still another, on calf slaughter "To get done with them faster, we'd put eight or nine of them in the knocking box at a time... You start shooting, the calves are jumping, they're all piling up on top of each other. You don't know which ones got shot and which didn't... They're hung anyway, and down the line they go, wriggling and yelling" (to be slaughtered while fully conscious). And on pig slaughter "If the hog is conscious, ... it takes a long time for him to bleed out. These hogs get up to the scalding tank, hit the water, and start kicking and screaming... There's a rotating arm that pushes them under. No chance for them to get out. I am not sure if they burn to death before they drown, but it takes them a couple of minutes to stop thrashing."
The work takes a major emotional toll on the workers. Here's one worker's account "I've taken out my job pressure and frustration on the animals, on my wife, ... and on myself, with heavy drink-ing." Then it gets a lot worse "... with an animal who pisses you off, you don't just kill it. You ... blow the windpipe, make it drown in its own blood, split its nose... I would cut its eye out... and this hog would just scream. One time I ... sliced off the end of a hog's nose. The hog went crazy, so I took a handful of salt brine and ground it into his nose. Now that hog really went nuts..."
Safety is a major problem for workers who operate sharp instruments standing on a floor slippery with blood and gore, surrounded by conscious animals kicking for their lives, and pressed by a speeding slaughter line. Indeed, 36 percent incur serious injuries, making their work the most hazardous in America. Workers who are disabled and those who complain about working conditions are fired and frequently replaced by undocumented aliens. A few years ago, 25 workers were burned to death in a chicken slaughterhouse fire in Hamlet, NC, because management had locked the safety doors to prevent theft. Here is a worker's account "The conditions are very dangerous, and workers aren't well trained for the machinery. One machine has a whirring blade that catches people in it. Workers lose fingers. One woman's breast got caught in it and was torn off. Another's shirt got caught and her face was dragged into it." Although Slaughterhouse focuses on animal cruelty and worker safety, it also addresses the issues of consumer health, including the failure of the federal inspection system. There is a poignant testimony from the mother of a child who ate a hamburger contaminated with E. coli "After Brianne's second emergency surgery, surgeons left her open from her sternum to her pubic area to allow her swollen organs room to expand and prevent them from ripping her skin... Her heart ... bled from every pore. The toxins shut down Brianne's liver and pancreas. An insulin pump was started. Several times her skin turned black for weeks. She had a brain swell that the neurologists could not treat... They told us that Brianne was essentially brain-dead."
Slaughterhouse has some problems. In an attempt to reflect the timeline of the investigation, the presentation suffers from poor organization and considerable redundancy. But that's a bit like criticizing the testimony on my Holocaust experiences because of my Polish accent. The major problem is not with the content of the book, but with the publisher's cover design. The title and the headless carcasses pictured on the dust jacket effectively ensure that the book will not be read widely and that the shocking testimony inside will not get out to the consuming public. And that's a pity. Because the countless animals whose agony the book documents so graphically deserve to have their story told. And because Slaughterhouse is the most powerful argument for meatless eating that I have ever read. Eisnitz' closing comment "Now you know, and you can help end these atrocities" should be fair warning. After nearly 25 years of work on farm animal issues, including leading several slaughterhouse demonstrations, I was deeply affected. Indeed, reading Slaughterhouse has changed my life.

Slaughterhouse is available from FARM (PO Box 30654, Bethesda, MD20824), Humane Farming Association (PO Box 3577, San Rafael, CA 94912), and most bookstores. People who would like to help get this information to the general public should contact FARM and HFA.

The real answer here is a vegetarian diet - preferably vegan - but it is a fact that the vast majority of the population is going to remain carnivorous for the foreseeable future. Therefore we have to consider the strangely titled subject of Humane Slaughter. The Hong Kong Government has constructed a new central abattoir in Sheung Shui. The SPCA was not allowed to be involved in the planning of this. We hope the Government has taken all possible steps to minimise the suffering of the condemned animals.

No one has yet made a survey of Asian factory farming but the current plans for multi-storey farming send shivers down the spines of all with an interest in animal welfare.

We should do our best to reveal to the public the horrors of modern systems of meat, poultry, fish and egg production. Shark's fins, veal and foie gras involve especial suffering.

Markets in China that sell live animals could be link to SARS
By Laurie Garrett
STAFF CORRESPONDENT

April 23, 2003, 12:43 PM EDT

Guangzhou, China - Here, at the epicenter of the disease known as SARS, dinner can be bought live at a "wet market."

Just outside the banking and commercial center of the capital of Guangdong Province stretches a wide, congested boulevard lined with machine shops, auto parts vendors and industrial parts outlets. Delivery trucks, lumbering buses and darting taxis vie for position.

Nestled amid the enterprises is Chau Tau market. Here, restaurant chefs and home gourmets, even traditional medicine makers, shop for exotic live animals, the much-desired delicacies of Cantonese cuisine. Guangdong is known for its consumption of snakes, turtles, a range of birds, assorted rodents and wild mammals, even cats and dogs.

The emphasis is on delicacies and variety. But freshness is utmost. So animals are purchased live and either butchered on the spot or in the buyer's kitchen.

World Health Organization officials are trying to determine whether there have been unusual die-offs of the sorts of wild animals consumed at dinner tables here - whether it's possible that a species was harboring the virus now known to be potentially fatal to humans. Science has long recognized zoonosis - animal-to-human disease spread - and that possibility is under study in the SARS outbreak. But the range of animal possibilities is vast - beyond even those arrayed in markets such as Chau Tau.

"This is very different from the United States, where you buy meat frozen or prepared" and have a limited choice of meats, explained Dr. Yuen Kwok-yung, a microbiologist at Hong Kong University. "In Chinese - Cantonese, really - this list is enormous. More than 40 species, at least. And the markets are right there, with live animals. So zoonosis is quite common in this sort of area."

There is, of course, no way to know if this market, or others like it elsewhere in the province, could have been the source of the severe acute respiratory syndrome virus.

"I think at this moment we don't know," the WHO's Dr. Henk Bekedam said in a news briefing in Beijing last night. "It will be very important to understand where it came from. We have been invited by the Guangdong government to come there and hunt now for where it came from. ... We are getting a team together now."

The virus that causes SARS is novel. And that very novelty argues that the microbe is not normally found in animals that come in close contact with humans, such as pets and livestock.

Guangzhou doesn't seem a likely place to find people and wild animals living in close proximity. The most recent Chinese census puts the city's population at about 11 million, but experts say it could be closer to 13 million. The city is not unlike Los Angeles - sprawling, crisscrossed by freeways. Guangzhou's most constant sound is construction noise, and the favored commercial architectural style is the glass-concrete-and-steel high-rise. Aside from a few city parks, the city is a concrete center of commerce and manufacturing in southern Guangdong, a Cantonese area that borders Hong Kong.

The Chau Tau market is an open-air warehouse space roughly the size of a New York City block. Animal dealers lounge about, playing mah-jongg, while their merchandise wiggles, claws and writhes in stacked cages, red plastic tubs of water or large mesh bags set on the concrete floor. The air is almost intolerably redolent of the urine and feces of dozens of species, including that of the human vendors. When the stench can no longer be tolerated, a large power hose is used to wash the filth away, effectively aerosolizing much of the muck into breathable droplets.

The merchandise is arranged in sections: Rows of freshwater and sea turtles in the reptile section, from palm-sized creatures to 40-pound terrapins. Close inspection reveals alligator snapping turtles from the United States, Burmese beak turtles, terrapins from Malaysia and Chinese box and softshell turtles.

An Indian cobra pops its hooded head from a cage as thousands of snakes writhe in mesh bags or cages. A vendor advises a visitor to step away from sacks of Asian pit vipers and Russell's vipers. Cages packed with wiggling black Asian rat snakes are stacked like crates of oranges. Larger serpents lie in compact coils.

The exotic bird section ranges in size from small songbirds to ostriches. Guinea fowls, pigeons, doves, peacocks, swans, with a variety of ducks and chickens, cower in cages or bump furiously against one another in large pens.

There's a section for dogs, which languish in pens. And dozens of cages are filled with cats that, on close examination, appear sickly, their eyes glazed and paws worn bloody.

The largest section of the market, spanning four rows about 100 yards long, features mammals caught in the wild, those captured by trappers from the mountains, swamps, forests and plains of China and southeast Asia. Chinese giant flying squirrels try to stretch their webbed arms in cramped cages. Masked palm civets hiss at passersby. Hog-nosed badgers squirm, waving their long claws as a salesman stuffs them in cages. Ferret badgers rub their noses raw and Chinese porcupines huddle in cage corners.

Vietnamese pygmy pigs, red-striped pigs, wild boars and a host of other wild swine snort from behind bars. A range of wild rodents are packed into cages: Chinese bamboo rats, nutrias, moles, mango rats, guinea pigs. Over boxes of shiny black guinea pigs are signs proclaiming "Chinese Viagra," a reference to a belief that the animals cure male impotence.

Many of the animals are obviously sick, and some had chewed off their limbs in apparent attempts to escape chains or traps. If the animals harbor bloodborne pathogens, there is plenty of opportunity for human exposure.

A number of species of small antelopes and deer are available. At one booth a dealer had placed a Sichuan barking deer on an intravenous drip. "It's running a fever," the dealer explained. "I'm saving it," because buyers will purchase only living animals.

Until two years ago, Chau Tau market was located outdoors, in Qingping Shichang park. But authorities cracked down on the vendors because tourists and world wildlife conservationists found the public market objectionable. Chau Tau was moved to the busy industrial boulevard, initially in an enclosed building.

Chau Tau was indoors in November, when the first SARS case was reported: 46-year-old Pang Zuoyao. Pang's home is about 12 miles away in Foshan, and Chinese health authorities say he received treatment in both cities. The virus subsequently spread to his family and health care workers.

If such a wet market had a role in that initial illness, the possibility would have been magnified in such an indoor setting. Throngs of shoppers are known to frequent such markets at that time of year intent on buying furry mammals. For it is widely believed in the Cantonese area, particularly among the elderly, that eating furry animals warms a person up in the winter and wards off disease, particularly pneumonia.

Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.