Live Animal Markets
by Jackie Dove

SAN FRANCISCO - Animals sold for food in San Francisco's live animal markets - frogs, lobsters, turtles, fish, and chickens, quail, doves and pheasants - are sold and slaughered on-the-spot to shoppers who insist on freshly-killed cuisine. While awaiting their deaths, these animals are confined in filthy conditions, with inadequate food or water. While the starvation, dehydration, suffocation and mutilation of animals are violations of the city's anti-cruelty laws and the San Francisco Health and Safety Code, neither the city nor the state has summoned the political will to halt the practice.

Frustrated after years of fighting for improvements from the merchants of Chinatown and Fisherman's Wharf, a coalition of animal rights activists sued 12 Chinatown merchants for violating the city's health and safety code. Chinatown merchants characterized the objections as a racist attack on cultural traditions.

But Asian-American animal rights activists, particularly Asians for Humans, Animals and Nature, Compassion Over Killing, and AsianWeek columnist Emil Guillermo deny that motives are racist. According to Chinese-American activist Vicky Lynn, "The Chinatown live animal market issue is not racist. The animal rights people are fighting cruelty. When they see that something is cruel, it doesn't matter who is committing the cruelty." Animal rights activists also condemn factory farming and the cruel practices of US and European slaughterhouses.P The activists are not trying to prevent people from eating their traditional food. They are simply demanding that animals killed for food must be housed and slaughtered humanely according to existing law.

In 1997, San Francisco attorney Baron Miller, acting on behalf of a coalition of animal rights groups, sought an injunction against 12 Chinatown merchants selling live seafood and poultry. The lawsuit was filed as a last resort after animal activists failed to convince the Board of Supervisors to regulate the live animal markets, this despite the fact that the Board's advisory panel, the San Francisco Commission of Animal Control and Welfare, had recommended banning all live animal sales two years earlier.

Superior Court Judge Carlos T. Bea ruled against the animal rights activists in 1998, arguing that the Bible's language granting humans "dominion" over animals condones animal cruelty. "To find pain in the animal would be to indulge in anthropomorphic speculation, which is hardly sufficient basis for the application of criminal statutes," Judge Bea declared. Even though the method of killing turtles is "painful and distasteful," Bea ruled, it is nonetheless legal because no preferable alternatives exist.

In Chinatown shopes, live turtles are hacked apart limb by limb and their shells are cut off shell while the animal is still alive. Chickens, frogs, and doves are suffocated by stuffing them into plastic bags. Frogs are clubbedand skinned alive. Meanwhile, along the city's colorful Fisherman's Wharf, live lobsters are routinely tossed live into the scalding waters of lobster pots. According to Chinese-American veterinarian Dr. Lexie Endo, turtles sold in live animal markets carry salmonella and pasteurella bacteria, both potentially fatal to humans.

The philosophies of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism oppose animal cruelty.

Acting as a mediator, the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) brokered a set of voluntary guidelines for the merchants to follow as a humane "compromise" to this conflict. It was signed by Chinatown merchants, activists and the Chinese Six Companies.

The compromise prohibited selling injured or diseased animals, storing animals in cramped conditions, and removing feathers, skin and shell while the animal is still alive. This agreement, however, was scuttled last September when the SPCA and merchants clashed over whether incising a live turtle's shell before decapitating it was inhumane.

Observers of the Chinatown markets say conditions have not changed. If anything, they are worse.

- Jackie Dove / "Unheard Cries," San Francisco Liberation Radio [www.slip.net/~dove/shame.html]

What You Can Do: At its February 4 meeting in Sacramento, the California fish and Game Commission will consider a proposed ban on importing live turtles and frogs for live animal food markets. Letters supporting the ban are needed: CA Fish and Game Commission, 1416 9th St, Sacramento CA 95814. (Send copies of your letters to Earth Island.) For more information call The Fund for Animals [(415) 474-4020] or Action for Animals [(510) 652-5603].