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Plague rats being used to supply restaurants
LIVE rats are being trucked from central China, suffering a plague of a reported two billion rodents displaced by a flooded lake, to the south of the of country to end up in restaurant dishes, Chinese media has reported. "Recently there have been a lot of rats ... Guangzhou people are rich and like to eat exotic things, so business is very good,'' the China News Service quoted a vendor as saying.Some vendors had asked people from a village in Hunan province, near Dongting Lake, to sell them live rats, the Beijing News said today. "The buyers offered 6 yuan (9c) for a kilo, but as to where they will sell the rats, they would not say,'' the newspaper quoted a local resident as saying, adding that villagers had to catch the rats live. "If we want to do that, there is no problem. We could catch 150 kilos of rats in one night .. .but we will not do this against our conscience,'' the villager was quoted as saying. Some Guangdong restaurants were promoting "rat banquets'', charging 136 yuan ($20.70) for one kg of rat meat, the newspaper said. Local governments in Hunan have been grappling with the rats, which had already destroyed 1.6 million hectares of crops and could spread disease, according to media reports. A lack of snakes, also a popular dish in the south, and owls, a traditional Chinese medicine, was held partly responsible.
Scientists have also blamed China's massive Three Gorges Dam project and climate change for the Hunan rodents' flight to dry land. Posted by: tipper 2007-07-16 |
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| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=193602 |