Hong Kong allows hamster pet stores to resume business after COVID cull

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Dozens of pet shops that offered hamsters in Hong Kong might resume enterprise from Sunday, Hong Kong’s authorities stated, after being shuttered final week and hundreds culled over coronavirus fears.

Authorities enraged pet lovers with an order to cull greater than 2,200 hamsters after tracing an outbreak to a employee in a store the place 11 hamsters examined constructive. Imported hamsters from Holland into the Chinese language territory had been cited because the supply. All hamster imports stay banned.

The town’s Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Division stated in a press release late on Saturday that it collected 1,134 samples from animals apart from hamsters together with rabbits and chinchillas, which had been all detrimental.

5 shops, together with the “Little Boss” pet store, which began the outbreak, remained shuttered as they’d not but “handed the virus check,” the federal government stated.

“All the opposite involved pet outlets then again have been totally disinfected and cleaned and the environmental swabs collected from these outlets have all handed the COVID-19 virus check,” it stated.

The federal government stated on Friday it could compensate pet outlets buying and selling in hamsters, providing a one-off fee of as much as HK$30,000 (US$3,850).

Individuals who had in latest weeks purchased hamsters – in style house pets within the congested metropolis – had been ordered to give up them for testing and what the federal government described as “humane dispatch”.

1000’s of individuals supplied to undertake undesirable hamsters amid a public outcry towards the federal government and its pandemic advisers, which authorities referred to as irrational. A examine printed in The Lancet medical journal, which has not but been peer reviewed, stated Hong Kong researchers have discovered proof that pet hamsters can unfold COVID-19 and linked the animals to human infections within the metropolis.

Nevertheless, the financial and psychological tolls from Hong Kong’s hardline method to curbing the virus are quickly rising, residents say, with measures turning into extra draconian than these first enforced in 2020.

(Reporting by Farah Grasp; modifying by Grant McCool)