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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: March 2007

Civet traffic falls in China

 

Guangzhou--Repeated health inspections of specialty meat markets across Guangdong province hint that masked palm civets may at last be getting some respite from Guangdong exotic meat buyers.

In January 2007, the Xinhua News Service reported, 7,000 health inspectors checked for civets at 10,000 restaurants, finding one live civet and several frozen civet carcasses. A restaurant in Foshan was fined for buying civets, and 18 restaurants were fined for unspecified reasons. The contraband was markedly less than was found in a November 2006 raid on an underground warehouse and nearby meat shop that found 45 masked palm civets, 98 ferret badgers, and 31 other wild animals who are barred from sale for consumption.

"The vendors told us the civets were from the northern part of China," Guangzhou Forestry Public Security Bureau commissar Chen Xibiao told Ivan Zhai of the South China Morning Post. "There are masked palm civet farms in some provinces like Hubei and Shanxi," Zhai alleged, "that have not prohibited the sale of masked palm civets like Guangdong has."

As many as 10,000 civets confiscated from markets and warehouses were killed after Guangdong banned the sale of civets in January 2004, under pressure from Beijing, to help halt the spread of Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome. Emerging in Guangdong in 2003, SARS infected approximately 8,000 people worldwide within months, killing about 800, including 299 in Hong Kong and nearly 500 in mainland China.

SARS strains are endemic among both masked palm civets and Chinese horseshoe bats. Investigators suspect SARS originated among the bats, then mutated in masked palm civets into the form that attacks humans.

A survey of 24,000 people in 16 Chinese cities, released in April 2006 by WildAid and the China Wildlife Conservation Association, found that 72% had not eaten wild animals in the past year, up from 51% in a 1999 survey.