Criminals don’t cease at only one sort of animal & human exploitation
HONG KONG; HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam––Recent busts in Hong Kong introduced crime, rabies, wildlife trafficking, unlawful immigration, and the canine and cat meat commerce collectively as by no means earlier than––and extra might quickly observe.
“Law enforcement agencies in Hong Kong have arrested four asylum seekers and an illegal immigrant at a suspected unlicensed restaurant operating out of a flat that allegedly served dog and cat meat,” South China Morning Post reporters Danny Mok and Jiang Chuqin opened on March 1, 2024, describing probably the most recent of a six-month sequence of strikes at clandestine commerce between Vietnam and Hong Kong involving each cruelty to animals and threats to public well being.
77 kilos of suspected frozen canine and cat meat
“Officers seized 77 pounds of suspected frozen dog and cat meat,” wrote Mok and Chuqin, “as part of a joint operation carried out by the Agriculture, Fisheries & Conservation Department, Food & Environmental Hygiene Department and police.
Arrested at the scene were the 50-year-old chef, a 43-year-old woman, a 27-year-old man, and a 16-year-old boy. Mok and Chuqin did not identify the fifth arrestee.
Believed to have come from Vietnam, the suspects “had been serving cuisine prepared with suspected dog and cat meat in the flat for six months,” Mok and Chuqin stated.
Illegal in Hong Kong since 1950
Both the sale and the consumption of both canine or cat meat have been unlawful in Hong Kong since 1950.
“The commercial slaughter and sale of dog meat has been prohibited on the mainland since May 2020,” Mok and Chuqin famous, “with the policy taking effect a month after Shenzhen and Zhuhai introduced their own citywide bans on the consumption of dog and cat meat.”
The risk that the suspected canine and/or cat meat might need come from Vietnam raised the additional concern that rabies might need include any Vietnamese animals introduced alive for slaughter, or with recent Vietnamese immigrants who slaughtered dogs and cats whereas nonetheless in Vietnam.
The rabies virus doesn’t survive after an contaminated physique cools off, however the canine and cat meat commerce has been acknowledged since 2009 as a serious rabies vector in Vietnam.
(See Rabies deaths drive effort in Vietnam to stop eating dogs & cats.)
Rabies
Vietnam solely two months into 2024 has already had 18 human rabies deaths, Tuoi Tre News of Ho Chin Minh City reported on February 29, 2024. Vietnam skilled 82 human rabies deaths in 2023, up from 70 in 2022.
“In 2023,” Tuoi Tre News stated, “the national vaccination coverage rate against the deadly virus among dogs was a mere 50%,” effectively under the 70% minimal vaccination price vital to stop a rabies outbreak from spreading.
A examine printed by the peer-reviewed journal Science in September 2023, “Sick as a dog? The prevalence, politicization, and health policy consequences of canine vaccine hesitancy,” by Matt Motta, Gabriella Motta, & Dominik Stecula, indicated that the U.S. price of canine vaccination in opposition to rabies might have dropped as little as 53%, however not like Vietnam, the U.S. doesn’t have a big inhabitants of free-roaming dogs amongst whom a rabies reservoir might persist.
Poached swiftlet nests
Hong Kong police in the meantime ended 2023 and opened 2024 by making two of the most important busts of the unlawful site visitors in poached swiftlet nests, used to make chook’s nest soup, a standard Southeast Asian delicacy of no precise dietary or medicinal worth.
The first of the 2 busts, on December 20, 2023, discovered 331 kilos of birds’ nests stashed aboard a tour bus intercepted on the Shenzhen Bay management level on the border between Hong Kong and mainland China.
The second, on January 4, 2024, “confiscated nearly 500 pounds of bird’s nests worth $1.2 million in U.S. dollars, hidden in a truck headed to mainland China,” the South China Morning Post reported.
Dried seafood
“A 52-year-old woman, director of a consignor company, was also arrested following the confiscation of the goods at the Kwai Chung Customs House Cargo Examination Compound, the South China Morning Post continued.
“The smuggled items, which were destined for Vietnam, were detected when a container underwent an X-ray examination.”
Boxed with the birds’ nests had been a number of hundred kilos of dried seafood.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Increased consideration to smuggling
Chinese authorities, together with in Hong Kong, seem to have been paying elevated consideration to smuggling of animal merchandise since early 2020, when the Chinese authorities responded to the then simply rising COVID-19 pandemic by banning the commerce and consumption of untamed animals.
How large the site visitors stays is anybody’s guess, however an evaluation of greater than 9,200 Chinese courtroom convictions for unlawful searching recorded between 2014 and 2020, carried out by researchers from Sun Yat-sen University in southern China, Princeton University, and the University of Tennessee discovered that greater than one-fifth of all identified amphibian, reptile, chook and mammal species had been being poached, each for meals and to be used in conventional medicines.
Only 5% of the convictions accounted for 90% of the greater than three million animals of 670 species concerned within the prison instances, the researchers discovered.
The findings had been printed within the peer-reviewed journal Nature in October 2023.
Ten weeks in jail
The March 1, 2024 dog-and-cat-meat restaurant raid got here simply over a 12 months after an identical bust within the Yau Ma Tei district of Hong on February 9, 2023 led to the April 2023 conviction of a 40-year-old man for possession of frozen cat meat.
The man was sentenced to serve ten weeks in jail.
In November 2023 a Hong Kong Agriculture, Fisheries & Conservation Department investigation of alleged on-line gross sales of canine meat led to the invention of “a sophisticated scam that tricked victims out of about $166,000 in U.S. dollars, after they shared personal details through a fraudulent mobile app,” reported Stacy Shi for The Standard.
The fraudulent app supplied receipts purporting to be from the Hong Kong Homeless Dog Shelter.
“The shelter’s founder, Angela Chan Ka-yee, said on Facebook that she had reported the bank account as stolen,” Stacy Shi wrote.
In addition to concentrating on prospects for canine meat, police stated, the scammers “were attempting to raise public attention and lure animal lovers, who might have downloaded the app to trace the identity of the seller,” who eventually report stays at giant.
