Killing appetites
Restaurant that publicly killed cows sparks questions over slaughter regulations
The agricultural authorities in Quanzhou, East China’s Fujian Province, said Sunday that they will investigate a local hot pot restaurant which has been criticized as cruel for slaughtering cattle in public.
The slaughter started on March 21 in a tent just outside the restaurant in the Singapore City residential community in Jinjiang county, the Quanzhou Evening News reported Sunday.
When the Quanzhou Evening News reporter visited the restaurant on Saturday morning, the butcher was busy chopping up beef with several onlookers around him.
The butcher was dismembering a pregnant cow that had been slaughtered earlier, the reporter said, and was removing the fetus from its mother.
He then sent the beef to the restaurant, which had a queue of customers waiting to get their lips around some fresh meat.
The butcher told the reporter that “they opened the restaurant and came up with the idea to attract clients.”
The butcher claimed that the public slaughter and butchery aims to reassure people that “our beef is the real thing, not injected with water.” Water injection is a common among unscrupulous traders looking to raise the weight of a piece of meat.
Most of the beef from the cows is supplied to the restaurant and the rest
is sold to nearby residents at half market price, according to the butcher, who said that they kill a calf each day.
The restaurant owner surnamed Lei confirmed with the Quanzhou Evening News that they have now stopped publicly slaughtering animals.
‘ Too cruel!’
Hu Xingdou, a professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, told the Global Times on Monday that the restaurant’s behavior was just a show which proves nothing about the beef’s safety and quality, which should be proved by official documents.
“And they would not leave a good impression with the public as it was so cruel and bloody,” Hu said.
“They disembowel cattle in public. Awful!” a local surnamed Huang told the Quanzhou Evening News.
“It is too cruel! It scares my children every time we pass there,” another local surnamed Chen said, adding that many residents agree that the bloody spectacle was “unbearable.”
Lei told the newspaper that he felt sorry for any negative effects the slaughter brought to residents.
He noted that he hired a company to disinfect the area every day.
Meeting standards
A staff member with the butchery management department under the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture told the Global Times on condition of anonymity Monday that China has no national regulations on cattle and sheep slaughter.
“Local governments above the county- level have to make their own regulations,” the staff member said.
According to the staff member, in some provincial- level regions like Beijing and North China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, cattle and sheep have to be butchered in designated slaughter houses which are licensed by local agriculture bureaus.
In other areas, slaughterhouses must meet standards set by the Animal Epidemic Prevention Law.
It is not reported whether the Jinjiang restaurant met these standards.
The director of the slaughter department under the Quanzhou agriculture bureau, surnamed Wu, told the Quanzhou Evening News that the city has not implemented a mandatory fixed- point system for cattle or sheep slaughter at present.
A fixed- point system mandates that slaughter should only occur in officially approved slaughterhouses with properly trained staff.
No national rule
The agriculture ministry released a draft regulation on poultry and livestock slaughter in May 2014 to solicit public opinions.
The draft lays out a fixed- point slaughter system for pigs, cattle, sheep and chicken.
While meat consumption has rocketed in China since the 1990’ s, problems including people injecting cattle and sheep with steroids or water and selling other meats as beef and mutton still remain a threat to the safety of consumers, read the draft.
Pork, beef and mutton made up 98 percent of China’s meat consumption as of May 2014 and therefore it is necessary to include the latter two meats into a fixed- point system to ensure safety, said an explanatory document released by the ministry in May 2014.
The ministry staffer said that the draft is still under revision at present and there is no timetable for its implementation.
China issued a regulation on pig slaughter in 1997, establishing a fixedpoint system.
Vice Minister of Agriculture Chen Xiaohua vowed at a meeting in February to promote the revision of relevant laws and regulations on food quality and slaughter to safeguard food safety.
“Special regulations on cattle and sheep slaughter should be issued in accordance with the same standards applied to pigs as Chinese people are eating more and more beef and mutton,” Hu Xingdou noted.