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 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, 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 SARS 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 800 million yuan (US$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.
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," she said.
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," Mather said.
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