State Stays Out of Live-Food Debate
By Janet Dang

A bill passed by the state legislature last week will leave it up to city officials to regulate the ongoing -- and often times emotional -- battle between animal rights activists and Chinatown merchants who want to sell live turtles, frogs and other animals at food markets.

The bill, sponsored by Assemblyman Mike Honda, D-San Jose, passed in the Legislature 45-to-11 Jan. 24, and has been moved to the Senate. If passed, the bill will represent a blow to animal rights groups because it will allow local government to choose whether to regulate the sale of those animals.

Honda’s bill had originally asked the Fish and Game Commission to write statewide regulations and issue permits for selling live animals.

Animal rights groups have been urging the commission to ban the importation of the animals, asserting that imported turtles and frogs ruin the native environment because compassionate people would buy them just to release them in the wild -- endangering other animals, the environment and humans.

Pius Lee, co-chair of the No Ban Coalition on the Importation of Turtles and Frogs, said that the bill will let the city decide on a regulatory system where a permit is required to sell live animals.

“If we have a permit system, the fish markets can apply for a permit from the city government,” Lee said. The permit will enforce subsequent regulations forbidding merchants to sell animals without killing them first.

“If [merchants] violate the law, their license might get revoked,” Lee added.

According to Lee, the merchants aren’t being regulated by the city. They’ve been asked to post signs that the animals won’t be sold live. But even that is voluntary.

“Right now there is no system,” Lee said.

Animal rights advocates have claimed animals are still being sold alive in San Francisco and Oakland Chinatown markets.

“The Fish and Game Commission has done nothing on this issue,” Rose Lernberg, legislative chair of the Contra Costa Humane Society said. “[This bill] gives them many more reasons for avoiding doing anything,” she added.

Lernberg believes that cities like San Francisco and Oakland with a high population of Asian and Chinese Americans will unlikely be supportive of any proposed local regulations on the sale of these animals.

“It’s a political hot potato. Local government can already do this [regulate] if they wanted to. This issue went to state level because San Francisco is not doing anything.

“We don’t expect local government to do what they’ve already refused to do,” she added.

In 1998, a superior court judge ruled that Chinatown merchants’ treatment of live animals does not constitute cruelty. The suit was brought on by animal rights groups who have contended that animals are subjected to inhumane treatment -- turtles having their shells pried open while alive, frogs stacked upon each other two feet high in crowded and unsanitary receptacles -- violating animal cruelty laws.

While the lawsuit ensued, the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, a community group backing the merchants, had come to an agreement on how merchants should best handle the animals, including dismembering the animals only when they are dead.