Crackdown on menu for rare animal eaters

Porcupines in cages, endangered tortoises in buckets and snakes in cloth bags -- rare wildlife is on open sale at a Chinese market, despite courts being ordered to jail those who eat endangered species.

The diners of southern China have long had a reputation for exotic tastes, with locals sometimes boasting they will "eat anything with four legs except a table".

China in April raised the maximum sentence for anyone caught selling or consuming endangered species to 10 years in prison, but lax enforcement is still evident in the province of Guangdong.

"I can sell the meat for 500 yuan ($80) per half kilo," a pangolin vendor at the Xingfu -- "happy and rich" -- wholesale market in Conghua told AFP. "If you want a living one it will be more than 1,000 yuan."

The market was the subject of a Chinese media expose two years ago, when a local official told the state-run Beijing Technology Times that its role as a centre for animal trafficking was an "open secret".

The seller, who declined to be named, said making a living from his creatures was getting tougher. "Now it's governed very strictly," he said.

But on a recent morning traders were out in force, with hundreds of snakes writhing in white cloth bags and wild boars staring plaintively from wire cages.

Not all the produce is illegal but a huge sign touted giant salamanders, which are classed as critically endangered -- one level below "extinct in the wild" -- on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List of threatened species.

Asian yellow pond turtles were up for sale beside porcupines, most likely from Asia where several species are also critically endangered.

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