The Xinyuan wild game market reeks of animal waste and death. Trucks arrive daily with animals jammed into cages -- cats, dogs, pigeons, boars, ostriches, even rats. The people who work in the market live in cages, too. They sleep above their shops, in tiny lofts with bars for walls.
When they awoke on Tuesday they ran squarely into the local government's new war against SARS. Animal-control officers in masks and smocks confiscated 148 animals, including civets, which some scientists believe are SARS carriers. The animals, relatives of the mongoose that would have ended up as a stew on local menus, earned no reprieve.
"All of them will be killed today," said Lian Junhang, a local forestry bureau official overseeing the roundup at Xinyuan.
The resolve of officials here in Guangdong Province to slaughter an estimated 10,000 civets and other animals as a preventive measure against SARS was on vivid display. Even as international health officials urged caution, Chinese media reported that local health workers in protective suits and goggles were plunging caged civets into pools of water and drowning them.
The extermination campaign, expected to be finished by tomorrow, came as state media announced that the 32-year-old SARS patient here whose case rekindled fears of another outbreak was to be released from hospital yesterday. He has recovered, though experts still do not know how he contracted the virus.
Guangdong officials decided on Monday to kill the civets hours after Chinese researchers announced that the local SARS patient had a new strain of SARS similar to one found in the ferret-like animal. But here at Xinyuan, the largest wild-game market in this provincial capital, people refuse to believe civets can spread SARS, just as few believe the government can totally prevent people here from eating them.
"It's going to continue," predicted Zhou Guanghong, who raises civets at a farm and sells them at Xinyuan.
"People will still eat them," he said.
His fellow merchants, playing cards on a day with no customers, shared his disgust with the government.
"I don't understand the government," complained a man who identified himself only as Mr. Tang.
"If it was for the sake of my health, I've been working here and I haven't had any problems. We're eating and living beside civets, and all of us are in good health," he said.
Nor were the merchants alone in their skepticism. On Monday night, experts from the World Health Organization cautioned that more scientific research was needed to definitively prove that SARS had spread to humans from civets. The health group, which has long called for strict regulation of wild-game markets, nonetheless warned that Guangdong should fully assess all risks to avoid infecting the people carrying out the slaughter.
But Guangdong officials, perhaps motivated by the harsh criticism they received for their botched handling of the initial outbreak last year, seemed determined to act aggressively. Officials reportedly even set up roadblocks on highways to catch anyone trying to smuggle civets out of the province.
"Guangdong is entering an extraordinary period and extraordinary measures are called for," Feng Liuxiang, deputy director of the provincial health bureau, told the Guangzhou Daily.
Lian, the forestry official at the Xinyuan market, said three animals -- not only civets but two lesser-known animals that Chinese health officials have linked to SARS, raccoon dogs and hog badgers -- had been singled out for extermination. All three were confiscated from the market on Tuesday.
National health officials have announced plans to further regulate wild-game markets and register people who work in them. But how long they will maintain their interest remains to be seen. A previous ban on selling civets in Guangdong, imposed last year after the SARS outbreak, was quietly removed in late summer under pressure from merchants after the virus was no longer deemed a threat.
The effort to better regulate workers was apparently under way at the market on Tuesday, though limitations were evident. Local medical workers took blood samples while the workers filled out questionnaires about which animals they handled and whether they had suffered from SARS symptoms.
One man, Li Zheng, 27, stood holding his arm.
"This is the fourth time I've given blood as part of a test around here," he said. He said that at the height of the SARS epidemic, as many as 80 percent of the workers gave blood samples, but that most had dropped out. He said he keeps doing it not because he fears SARS but because "it's a free medical checkup."
Workers like Li repeatedly point out that no one in the Xinyuan market, not even those bitten by civets, had ever contracted SARS. But the market would seem to make an ideal breeding ground for any number of diseases.
One employee estimated that over 1,000 people live and work at Xinyuan, and the proximity between people and animals is very close. A young mother nursed her infant in a plastic chair not far from animal cages. Toddlers ran on concrete littered with animal entrails, bird droppings and even dead chickens and rabbits. At one shop, a man skinned a dog as blood trickled onto the ground.
The one visible effort at hygiene came at the end of the day when two men in smocks passed through the market, spraying disinfectant.
The conditions endured by the animals at Xinyuan and other wild-animal markets have long been condemned as barbaric by animal rights activists. On Tuesday, a large truck delivered a shipment of dogs from Henan province that eventually will be eaten. Dealers had jammed as many as three dogs, some large, into cages roughly 30cm by 90cm.
There were hundreds of cats that also would be sold for meat, many of them pressed so tightly into cages that they seemed indistinguishable from one another. A dealer bringing in a shipment of cats simply hurled the cages off the top of a truck down onto the ground.
Winter is considered the peak season for civet sales. The price of civets rose during the 1990s as more wealth poured into Guangdong, and dealers say they can make a nice profit on the animals. In all, dealers selling civets to restaurants might earn more than US$200 a month, far more than they could earn from farming.
But they say SARS has devastated the civet market and also badly damaged sales for wild food.
"I've got to go back to farming again," said Tang, the man playing cards.
"There is no more business anymore. Business stopped a few days ago," he said.
The large amounts of money involved -- one estimate valued the wild-game market in China at US$100 million annually -- leads many experts to worry that an unregulated black market could emerge. The difficulties for Guangzhou in enforcing its ban are obvious: Many civets are farmed in neighboring provinces with no such restrictions.
Meanwhile, dealers at Xinyuan believe the government has simply gone too far.
"Are you still eating beef?" asked Xiong Xianming, a dealer.
"You're an American and you've got mad cow disease in America? Does this mean you're going to kill every cow in America?" he asked.
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