TNAG-0469-FCO40-534-Legislation-for-protection-of-wild-life-in-Hong-Kong-1974 — Page 122

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PENN

PENN

flesh

Monkey and gibbon meat, remarked one informant, as good as human

which was served in restaurants during the Japanese occupation. Arguments are sometimes offered that pain is minimal in the lower vertebrates, such as snakes - which in Hong Kong by hundreds and thousands annually are almost certainly skinned alive.

The Government zoologist, John Romer, is Hong Kong adviser on reptiles to the IUCI!.

Romer

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If a shrew, a house shrow here in Hong Kong, seizes a frog, the frog will sometimes scream literally scream. You hardly ever hear a frog scream. You hear them croak, but I've heard them screan. This is because they've been in the jaws of a shrow something that's going to eat them. I can't believe that this is just an instinctive reaction to being got hold of because every time I pick up a frog and I've picked up hundreds and hundreds they never scream.

Penn

What about snakes?

Romer

Snakes? Well, this is a thing I'm personally very interested in of course, and because of my personal interest, and because of things that I believe go on with snakes (it may be that snakes are sometimes skinned alivo- this is a thing which disturbs me). I have raised this with a personal friend who happens to be a world renowned herpitologist and anatomist; and I asked him this question: "Do you consider that if a snake were skinned alive it would feel pain?" and he said "Certainly I do". If you wore to skin a snake you'd have to sort of tear the skin off from the flesh. You'd have to cut it round its neck and pcel it backwards and you'd have to pull it fairly hard to do it.

They are vertebrate animals. They're higher in the evolutionary scale than frogs we were talking about earlier. And they certainly have a nervous system. I don't personally doubt that snakes feel pain. But don't ask me to what extent they feel it.

Difficult to believe isn't it, that Hong Kong has really quite adequate cruelty laws on paper.

Cruelty and health hazards could be diminished, at least, by slaughter in Government abbatoirs. This is a requirement for cattle and pigs from China even. But these wild carnivores - all of them potential carriers of rabies and other diseases fatal to Man - enter Hong Kong unchecked, though the Director suggested otherwise.

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