Chinese wildlife protectors are collecting signatures from cooks in a nationwide campaign entitled "No cooking precious, rare wildlife", which aims to encourage cooks not to prepare dishes made from wild animals.

The chief organizer, the China Wildlife Conservation Association (CWCA), expects the move to save wildlife by blocking the way to dinner tables.

More than 180 cooks from China's mainland, Macao, Hong Kong and Taiwan attended the inauguration ceremony held on January 26, 2002 in Beijing.

Besides offering their signatures, these cooks solemnly swore together that they'd "refrain from cooking precious, rare wildlife dishes" and hoped this "would awaken the good conscience of the people".

CWCA expects to collect more than 3.2 million signatures in this campaign, which it hoped would spread the "wildlife conservation" theme far and wide and incidentally beat the Guiness record for signatures. China has more than eight million professional cooks at present.

An CWCA official said the campaign was prompted by still rampant eating of wild animals in some parts of China. A CWCA survey in 1999 shows that of wild animals dishes on the dinner table, 86.8 percent were game and only 13.2 percent were specially bred. Some 26.4 percent were game animals on the state protected list.

Eating dishes made of wild animals used to be prevalent in some parts of China, especially South China's Guangdong province, as people believe that wildlife has high nutritional and tonic value.

The Chinese government and non-governmental forces have been striving hard to halt such practices. According to regulations in Guangdong, people who knowingly eat dishes that contain animals on the state protection list will be fined 10,000 yuan (about US$ 1,205), three times the average local monthly salary.

People responsible for the hunting, processing, purchasing or slaughtering of such protected animals will be fined up to 100,000 yuan (US$ 12,048), according to the regulation.

(Xinhua News Agency January 30, 2002)