Turtle Shanghai

[Guest guest]

Hi,

 

Something we sent out recently to Greenpeace. Probably not the most

competent animal protection organization but strong in France. If

there is any steps or publicity you could do in this please give us

your feedback.

 

Best regards

 

Belinda and Tibor

 

---

Sonntag, 19. Februar 2006 23:50

'supporter.services'

Turtle

 

 

Dear Greenpeace activists,

 

Me and my husband Tibor Kovacs just relocated to Shanghai, China. We

are coming from Germany, where we have already active in animal

support and now we are trying the same here.

 

Yesterday we have experienced something shocking. As many expats we

were shopping at Carrefour, the highly successful French retail

chain. It is popular for ist extensive assortment and a very

reasonable price/quality ratio. This however is not the case when it

comes to animal products.

 

In the store we called on yesterday there was a seafood counter with

living animals. Beside fish they had turtles of different kinds

(really huge variety), big frogs and snakes in the offer. There were

far too many animals squeezed into little plastic crates filled with

insufficient quantities of water. Many of the animals were already

dead.

 

The customers can choose if they want their animals to be sold alive

or after having them slaughtered in the store. We bought one of the

turtles alive to set it free. To our surprise the price for this

relatively small to mid-size turtle was around CNY 1.100,- which

corresponds to roughly € 120,-. Quite a big amount of money even for

European circumstances let alone Chinese income levels. Most people

in China make less per month. This and other " signs " at the counter

(lots of interested people but no one really affording turtles)

clearly indicate that these exotic and extremely expensive animals

and their meat are affordable for the wealthiest few only.

 

We cannot understand that such animal torturing commercial

activities can exist in the world. What makes it even worse that it

is a European, in this case French corporation with French local

management (the shops managing director is called Jean Marc Dumont)

is proactively contributing to such development. Their sales and

revenues on the products obviously cannot compete with those of

other fast moving consumer goods due to low unit sales, very slow

rotation/turnaround, high maintenance costs in terms of personnel

and energy, etc.. But even if it was a commercially viable

undertaking, I think it is disgusting and wrong to torture and sell

animals in such a manner.

 

We did not exactly know to whom to refer to and hope that you can

intervene and use your network to put the issue forward in a

powerful way. Parenthetically we are sending this e-mail also as a

fax to the French Greenpeace team (we could not make out their e-

mail address on the website) as their position is known as

particularly strong in France.

 

Please keep us posted on any development.

 

We hope we can achieve an improvement for these unprotected animals.

 

Best regards

Belinda and Tibor Kovacs

 

Cc Greenpeace France