Lin Min

    SPRING Festival is an occasion when many Chinese enjoy the most lavish dinner of the year. Pricey soups, such as bird’s nest and shark’s fin, have increasingly been seen at family reunion dinners or banquets aimed at sweetening relations with business partners or government officials.

    The demand for these ingredients has been soaring as the emerging nouveau riche class regards these soups more as a display of social status and financial power than simply as food.

    Growing demand has exacerbated the exploitation and hunt for these ingredients. Swifts in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia have reason to blame China’s emerging class of vainglory for their worsening plight.

    Traditionally, bird’s nests, made from the saliva of swifts, were sourced from caves. Now bird’s nest farming has become a “sunrise” industry, with entrepreneurs turning factory buildings into swift “motels.” In Malaysia alone, an estimated 35,000 swift farms are now operating.

    Owners of the swift “motels” entice the birds to build their nests in a concrete home — instead of their natural cave habitat — blasting shrill bird noises including mating calls from speakers. Some farmers reportedly destroy chicks and fertilized eggs to harvest the nests at times when prices are high. This inhumane exploitation is making bird’s nest farming a dirty business.

    Consumers of bird’s nests believe the prized food can stave off aging and enhance complexion. Knowledge of such cruelty should turn their faces pale.

    Cruelty behind the dinner tables of the rich doesn’t end there. When wealthy Chinese diners, the world’s largest consumers of shark’s fin, savor their sense of high class as they enjoy the fin soup, they are pushing sharks to the verge of extinction.

    The brutal practice of shark finning, where sharks die a slow death after the fins have been cut off, is blamed for the global decline of many shark species. It is believed that more than 100 million sharks are killed every year, most due to the demand for shark fin.

    In Hong Kong, the shark fin capital of the world, public perception of the consumption of shark fin is turning sour. Thousands of Hong Kong netizens joined a Facebook campaign dubbed “Cut gift money for shark fin banquets” last year. The campaign asked wedding guests to pay 30 percent less in their red envelops to newlyweds if the banquet menu contained shark’s fin soup. The campaign was launched following widespread outrage over the grisly discovery by divers in the Philippines, in February 2010, of a young whale shark floating on the surface, fins removed but still alive.

    Following the Facebook campaign, 12 restaurants in Hong Kong launched menus without shark’s fin soup. Four of the restaurants also promised to donate H$100 to a shark conservation project for every table they served with no shark’s fin.

    In contrast to the high-profile campaigns in the territory, mainland shark’s fin consumers seem to remain ill-informed of the cruelty and conservation issues arising from shark finning.

    A 2009 survey in 16 Chinese cities, including Shenzhen, showed that about one-third of urban residents had consumed shark’s fin in the previous 12 months, but more than three-quarters did not know the soup was made of fins, cartilage cut from the fish.

    Now it seems a public awareness campaign should be launched to educate the public, especially the rich, on the ecological impact and animal cruelty arising from the demand for the dinner table. The wealthy should also be particularly educated on the fact that shark’s fin contains heavy metals such as mercury, which can cause damage to the nervous system and male infertility.

    It also seems appropriate to warn newlyweds of the infertility danger if they decide to include the soup in the menu of their wedding banquets, where they usually receive the customary wishes for a baby soon.

    (The author is editor of the Shenzhen Daily News Desk.)