Transcript
Laurie Garrett: I would like to start out by taking you to Chau Tau Market, located in Guangzhou, about an hour and a half train ride from Hong Kong. This is an interesting market. It's one of about five or six of its kind in Guangdong Province. It's a massive place. You're looking at one aisle, of which there are many, in a facility that's more than a square block in size.
Each aisle specializes according to the species that it sells. You have fellows working there who are walking the borderline of legality. Their everyday activities, the products they sell, the way they treat the products and how they're sold are all marginally legal. So it's a tight-lipped group, a surly group. You're not going to get much information out of them. And they are prepared to lift their entire market up and relocate it in a black-market area at a moment's notice.
By the way, their products are underneath this game board. And the products will be specialized. Some of the aisles in the market specialize in exotic birds, such as peacocks and endangered songbirds, rare tropical birds and the like. You'll have whole aisles that are just bird species, entire aisles that are snakes and reptiles. All of these, of course, are bound for somebody's dinner table. The snakes and reptiles are often stored in sacks, writhing around on the ground where someone could easily step on them; cobras are brought from as far as southern India. There were snakes from every part of Southeast Asia and all over the region. Endangered turtles, including several that are on the Endangered Species List. And some of the turtles I analyzed and realized actually came from North America. You're looking at tortoises and turtles that are of every imaginable type and, again, very difficult to find these days in the wild.
Sichuan barking deer are a particularly popular item in the market. This one, interestingly, illustrates a key point about the exotic food market. The animals must be served fresh. They must be slaughtered just before being prepared. They must survive their journey from wherever they are hunted and be presented in absolutely the best possible health prior to slaughter. So this barking deer is on an IV drip. You may see the drip, the saline solution. This was, according to the tight-lipped seller, to, quote, "freshen it up."
But overall most of the animals, on close examination, are, of course, severely traumatized, ailing. Many have tried to escape their encagement by biting off limbs, so they are bleeding. And they are often caged next to their predators or prey in such a way that they will end up defecating and urinating on each other. This allows for a fantastic amount of spread of microbes from species to species within the market.
The animals are captured in the wild using snaring techniques that will, hopefully, not mangle them, because they will not sell well if mangled. And they're wired into these plastic boxes and then shipped huge distances, often going days jostling in the back of a truck somewhere with no water and no food. When they arrive, of course, the customers can't see them in these plastic boxes, so they get transferred, as this civet cat is being transferred, into a wire cage box which allows the would-be chef or purchaser to closely examine them and decide if this is suitable. Each of these steps is traumatic for the animal.
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