Cultures Clash Over Sale of Live Animals for Food

As far as Suzy Eum is concerned, the only chicken fit to feed her family is the one she can look in the eye before she takes it home and strangles it.

At least twice a month, Eum visits the Ming Kee Game Birds shop in Chinatown and picks out a large Rhode Island red. She inspects the squawking bird, then watches with satisfaction as the butcher stuffs the animal into a paper shopping bag for easy carrying.

“I want chickens that are very alive and have a lot of energy,” Eum said as she paid $7 for a hen recently. “When you eat a fresh chicken, your body feels healthier the next day.”

Across the food spectrum from Suzy Eum stands Patricia Briggs, a vegetarian and animal rights activist who thinks that the sale of live animals for food is reprehensible.

So outraged is Briggs by the practice that 18 months ago she petitioned the city and county of San Francisco to either tightly regulate or ban such sales. As an advisory commission moves closer to asking the County Board of Supervisors to restrict the sales of animals, debate on the issue has become increasingly heated.

On one side are animal rights advocates who accuse merchants of inhumane practices. On the other are Chinese merchants, chefs and activists who say that the animal rights groups are attacking Chinese culture.

“This whole thing just sort of mushroomed,” said Matthew Kaplan, a member of the San Francisco Commission of Animal Control and Welfare.

The issue is not unique to San Francisco. Environmental health officials in Los Angeles and Orange counties say they apply state health, fish and game, and cruelty-to-animal regulations in policing such stores in their jurisdictions.

But only one live-animal food store operates in Orange County and only a few in Los Angeles County. Compact San Francisco, home to the largest Chinatown in the United States, has more than a dozen live-animal food stores, said Ben Gale, director of the San Francisco County Bureau for Environmental Control.

At the center of the controversy are half a dozen Chinese markets.

Every day, Chinatown merchants sell hundreds of live turtles, frogs, lobsters, crabs, fish and birds to customers who share Eum’s belief that the best meat is the kind that enters your house still breathing. Chinese shoppers have long believed that fresh meat is tastier and more healthful.

The animals are displayed in tanks of bubbling seawater, plastic trays or wire cages, where discerning customers can see them, smell them and watch them move around before making their selection.

Most of the live animal shops are in Chinatown, strung along Stockton Street and Grant Avenue. Merchants say they have been a part of the community since its founding in the late 1800s.

As San Francisco’s Asian population has spread across the city, live animal shops have opened outside Chinatown, in the Richmond and Sunset districts. Live animals also are sold at some of the city’s farmers markets, and live crabs and lobsters are boiled in pots at Fisherman’s Wharf.

Animal rights activists say they generally do not object to grocery store meat and poultry, which are slaughtered under U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines intended to ensure a humane death. But the Chinatown establishments offer customers the option of taking the animals home live, so there is no way to control how they are killed. The activists contend that the creatures often are killed in ways that cause them unnecessary pain.

They also claim that the animals are treated inhumanely in the shops. They say that fish are crammed into dirty tanks, frogs and turtles are left in trays without water or food, and birds are kept in cages so small and crowded that they can’t stand upright.

“There is no question that these animals are often kept in inadequate conditions,” said Richard Avanzino, head of San Francisco’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a national animal advocacy group.

The SPCA’s investigators witnessed fish gasping for breath in a couple of inches of dirty water in some shops, merchants ripping the shells off live turtles, butchers chopping live fish in half, and frogs and turtles piled in bins without food or water, Avanzino said.

His group is preparing a videotape that it shot surreptitiously in live animal food shops and intends to show it to animal welfare commissioners at a public hearing in September.

Some Chinese activists acknowledge that conditions in some shops are less than perfect. But they resent the attempt to ban or tightly restrict the sale of live animals. And many merchants insist that they take good care of the animals and meet all state regulations.

“My animals get food, they get water. We clean their cages twice a day,” said Astella Kung, owner of Ming Kee Game Birds.

Kung, whose customers include immigrants from rural nations in Africa and South America, raises her chickens, pheasants, quails and doves on her East Bay farm and brings them in daily to the shop. She proudly notes that her birds leave the store in bags with air holes punched in them, a step she takes to prevent suffocation.

“The animal is my money,” she said. “I have to take care of them. If they die, I lose money.

“Why do these people complain about us? These kinds of animals God gave us for food.”

Althea Kippes, an animal welfare commission member, said the panel has three major concerns: It fears that the animals are treated inhumanely and that if inadequately cared for, they could carry disease. It also worries that the sight of live animals being sold for food adversely affects San Francisco’s tourist industry.

Kippes said that existing state regulations probably could address the sanitation and humane treatment issues.

“The question is, why is no one enforcing the laws in Chinatown?” she asked.

But Gale insisted that his department does apply state health regulations to the live-animal food shops. He said the shops are cited when inspectors find unsanitary practices, but that conditions in the shops in general are adequate. The health department has been unable to trace any instances of food-related disease back to the shops, Gale said.

“We don’t have any reports by physicians, and our complaints about sanitation conditions are at very small numbers,” he said.

Chinese travel guides scoff at the notion that tourists are repelled by the markets. The note that Chinatown is second only to Fisherman’s Wharf in the number of tourists it attracts annually.

“We bring 200 people through here a week,” said Shirley Fong-Torres, a Chinese cookbook author who leads culinary tours through Chinatown. “People are usually fascinated by the markets. It is a part of the sights, sounds and aromas of Chinatown that tell you you are in a different culture.”

At a public hearing Thursday, the animal welfare commission heard testimony from both sides and promised to decide in September to recommend that the Board of Supervisors either ban the sale of live animals altogether or more strictly regulate the conditions under which they are sold.

One Chinese homemaker’s voice quavered with emotion as she pleaded with the commissioners not to ban the sale of live animals for food.

“No matter what effort it would take . . . even if I have to go out into the country and buy a live chicken, I will do it,” vowed M.J. Lee, who said she has been preparing fresh-killed birds, frogs and turtles for her family for 35 years. “These people have no business coming into Chinatown and telling us how to buy and prepare food. We don’t interfere with them, why should they interfere with us?”

Chinese activist Rose Pak, a consultant to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, said she is disgusted by the campaign.

“They are just picking on Chinatown,” Pak said. “They are asking for these creatures to be treated like pets. But these are not pet stores. These animals are being sold for food.”

Eliott Katz, a veterinarian who is the president and founder of In Defense of Animals, a national animal rights organization, said animal rights advocates never intended to offend anyone’s cultural sensitivities when they took up the cause of animals sold for food.

“We deal with animal cruelty and abuse wherever we can make a difference,” Katz said.

“Each time you go after a particular segment of society that exploits or abuses animals, specialness is always their defense,” Katz said. “They always say: We’re being discriminated against, pick on someone else.”

One woman who says she is able to understand the depth of emotions on both sides of the debate is Lisa Gouw, a marine biologist and ethnic Chinese born in Singapore who is in charge of In Defense of Animals’ campaign here.

“My mother wouldn’t eat a chicken that wasn’t live an hour before she ate it,” said Gouw, who is a vegetarian. Gouw believes that the animal rights movement should work to regulate the care of animals for slaughter, rather than seek to banish the practice all together.

“But I am a realist. I am an Asian. I know that . . . we cannot abolish our culture and that we cannot be told to do this by white people. They can’t change our culture entirely. . . .”