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August 26, 1996

Cultures Clash in San Francisco Over Live-Animal Food Sales

By TIM GOLDEN


   SAN FRANCISCO -- There is a loud whapping in the background as May
Chang explains the marketing philosophy of her bustling food store in
Chinatown, whapping that mixes with a clamor of orders in Cantonese and an
occasional series of thumps. 

   The whapping is the sound of meat cleavers coming down on the heads of
live turtles and frogs. The thumps are live fish striking the butcher
block before scaling. The orders are for more. 

   "When I was a little girl in Shanghai," Mrs. Chang says, "my mother
always told me, 'When it is dead, you never know how long it has been
dead.' I have been here 20 years, but I still sell everything live. It is
healthier. If you offer people dead animals, they won't eat them." 

   None of this would be much of a problem in the marketplaces of
Shanghai, of course, or those of Santo Domingo or Spain. But in the city
of St. Francis, patron of the lesser creatures, unsuspecting merchants at
about a dozen Chinese stores around town and the customs of many centuries
have run headlong into the well-intentioned urban guerrillas of the
animal-rights movement. 

   "It's worse than we could ever imagine, the things that are going on!"
said Patricia Briggs, a cashier at the San Francisco Zoo who brought the
issue of live-animal sales in Chinatown before the city's Animal Control
and Welfare Commission. "These animals are under such tremendous stress.
I've seen the shells literally cut off of turtles. The fish flop out of
the boxes onto the sidewalk. There's absolutely no sensitivity at all!" 

   What's an animal-respecting, multiculturally sensitive, compulsively
democratic city to do? 

   There are those who might read from the minutes of the many official
meetings devoted to this question over the last 19 months and conclude
that in the eye of a bitter conflict between powerful constituencies, the
authorities have decided only to dither. Matthew Kaplan, chairman of the
Animal Welfare and Control Commission of the City and County of San
Francisco, a consultative body of the Board of Supervisors, insists that
this is not the case. 

   "I think it's time to take a stand on this," he said. "I definitely
think there's a problem, and it has to be addressed. I just don't know how
to do that yet." 

   In the course of evaluating Ms. Briggs' complaint that animals are
being overcrowded, underfed and then inhumanely killed at Chinese markets
in Chinatown and other parts of the city -- a complaint to which many of
her comrades have since added their impassioned voices -- Kaplan's
commission did what any self-respecting government commission charged with
such a sensitive matter might do: It formed a subcommittee. 

   The Live Animals for Food Consumption Subcommittee, in turn, has taken
testimony, examined photographs and scrutinized health codes. It has
searched far and wide for precedents. It has about a crusade against pet
turtle sales in New York in the 1970s. It has consulted with experts on
the debate over laws in Hialeah, Fla., ruled unconstitutional by the
Supreme Court, that had barred the ritual sacrifice of animals in the
Afro-Cuban religion, Santeria. And it has listened, very sympathetically,
to everyone concerned. 

   So has the subcommittee come to understand, for example, that to
thousands of people who live and shop in the largest Chinese cultural
enclave on the West Coast, the logic of live food sales is simple: A
freshly killed fish is a fresher fish, a healthy fish. Likewise a turtle
plucked from one of the teeming aquariums and butchered for soup, a frog
skinned for its legs, and all types of fowl, which are pulled from cages
at Ming Kee Game Birds on Grant Avenue and sold in paper bags with little
air holes for slaughtering at home. 

   "It's healthier," explained Tsu Hing, a 58-year-old housewife who was
picking up a red-eared slider turtle at Mrs. Chang's S.F. Hong Kong
Market, just down the busy one-way street from Ming Kee. "It gives people
more energy. The dead ones have all that blood in it. That would be
terrible!" 

   The subcommittee has also been admonished, though, that such practices
amount to cruelty, whatever its cultural referents. 

   "This is not a racially motivated situation," insisted Elliot Katz, the
president of In Defense of Animals, a national organization headquartered
just across the Golden Gate Bridge in Mill Valley. "We are advocates for
animals, whether it be with Mexican bullfighting or the dog racing or
cockfighting that some people say is indigenous to some Latino cultures,
or the factory farming that occurs across our country." 

   The merchants make the opposite point in a similar way: that there is
no more cruelty in their shops than there is to the slaughter of animals
on a chicken farm in Texas or a meat-packing plant in Illinois. The
difference, they say, is what they do in plain sight. "Fish live in
schools -- they don't complain about overcrowding," said Rose Pak, a
consultant to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. "They're trying to apply
pet-store standards to our markets. It's ludicrous!" 

   Astella Kung, 49, the hard-working proprietor of Ming Kee, had her own
doubts about the advocates' claims of even handedness. She says that about
a fifth of her customers are of Indian, Latin American or European
extraction. She also does business with practitioners of Santeria, who,
under a special city ordinance passed in 1992, can sacrifice animals so
long as they eat them afterward. Only the Chinese, Mrs. Kung complained,
are under attack. 

   "How about the homeless people?" she asked. "Why don't the animal
people use their energy to care for those people? They have no homes! They
are hungry!" 

   Carl Friedman, the director of San Francisco's Department of Animal
Care and Control, confesses to being surprised by none of this. 

   "In this town, if somebody's pet is hit by a car and people don't
respond quickly enough, you can bet that everybody's phone is going to
ring here," Friedman said. "Animals are taken very, very seriously." 

   Friedman, a philosopher in the animal-rights trenches, attributes this
heightened sensitivity to the city's political image as a haven for
beleaguered minorities. 

   "A lot of the people who come to the city have been oppressed in other
places," he said. "If you look at the makeup of the city, we always root
for the underdog. Most people have respect for other cultures and other
people, and it's not a big jump from that to respecting other life forms."


   This atmosphere, however, has yet to translate into actual dialogue
between the opposing sides of the live-animal-food debate. 

   At a subcommittee hearing last month in the community room of the
Chinatown Public Library, Mrs. Pak, delivered an impassioned speech
asserting that the animals in question were not pets but food, and had to
be understood that way. 

   One of the merchants' young adversaries hoisted a sign that read, "Rose
Pak I hope you're reincarnated as one of those frogs in the tanks." 

   "You come back as a fly," Mrs. Pak told the woman, "and I'll eat you
up!" 

   After another subcommittee meeting or two -- the panel gathers only
once a month -- Kaplan said the full commission would vote on a nonbinding
recommendation to the Board of Supervisors, which would then consider
whether to take action. 

   One of the proposed remedies, which is supported by many of the
animal-rights advocates, is a strict ban on all live food sales. Some
officials said a more likely alternative might be to broaden the
enforcement of existing laws in ways that would stop the sale of live
turtles, frogs and birds and regulate more closely the sale of fish and
other animals. 

   Neither of these proposals is likely to satisfy activists like Ms.
Briggs, who once picketed the Cow Palace when the circus was in town, and
joined in the campaign to stop Woolworth's from selling gerbils and
parakeets and other pets. Ms. Briggs said she believes Chinatown is just a
beginning, and that the struggle must be carried even to the defense of
crustaceans, to the mistreatment of lobsters and crabs boiled alive down
on Fisherman's Wharf, where she witnessed similarly appalling conditions
while working as a cashier at the Wax Museum. 

   "The time of the crustaceans is coming also," she said. "You'd think
people wouldn't care about lobsters, because they aren't cuddly and fuzzy
and they have these vacant looks and they don't vocalize. But you'd be
surprised how many people care."




Copyright 1996 The New York Times