Culling pet hamsters different to culling chickens – CUHK academic

Roger Chung Yat-nork, from the CUHK Centre for Bioethics, said hamsters have established relationships with humans as pets, and therefore killing them is different from when the government decided to cull a million chickens during the avian flu outbreak or when overseas countries killed minks during Covid-19.

He said that public health policies cannot be rationalized by a single factor of protecting citizens' health. Authorities must consider whether the measure is effective and proportional – such as whether killing 2,000 animals is excessive.

He questioned if it really was impossible to quarantine the animals and if there were any alternatives to make it less unsettling for citizens.

Chung said government advisors focused on microbiology, and it was no surprise that they would agree on the culling. But public health policies are not about microbiology alone, he said.

Chung made the comments on radio on Thursday after the government
put down 1,213 small animals after the pet shop infections.

The Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department said they have since put down all animals from the Causeway Bay pet shop and the shop’s Tai Po warehouse, which was used to store the animals.  

The animals from the Causeway Bay pet shop having been put down include 21 rabbits, 69 hamsters, and seven chinchillas, while the warehouse saw another 138 rabbits, 861 hamsters, two Syrian hamsters, 31 chinchillas, 81 guinea pigs, and three house mice being put down.  

The department said they will, within this week, finish the culling of all remaining hamsters being sold at the city’s 35 shops selling the animal.

It also asked citizens to surrender pet hamsters bought on December 22 or after, which led to teary farewells in families. A Cable TV video showed a child wailing as a hamster was taken away from him.

Several animal lovers headed to a Sha Tin site and stopped owners from giving up around five hamsters to the government. Volunteers will adopt the hamsters which the owners gave up. 

An online petition asking the government to stop the hamster killing has been signed by 32,000 people so far.

Professor Leo Poon Kit-man, head of the University of Hong Kong's public health laboratory sciences division, said Delta coronavirus was found in samples of the Little Boss pet shop staffer, the hamsters inside the shop, and Tai Po storage house. It is apparent that hamsters infected the humans, he said.

He said the situation is similar to during the H5N1 avian flu outbreak; that virus can easily spread in an environment with a dense population of animals.

People get close to pet hamsters and are more prone to get infected. Culling the hamsters can reduce infection risks, he said.

As for why no case of hamster-to-human infection is detected in the Netherlands where the hamsters are imported, Poon said Hong Kong's zero Covid strategy made it possible to trace sources of infection.