China Officials Deny Flood Rats on the Menu – Reuters

In the past few days, the Chinese internet has been alive with jokes and speculation that Guangzhou’s famously wide-ranging appetites might be brought to bear on the flood-driven field mouse invasion of Hunan’s Dongting Lake area.

Earlier this week, several newspapers, including the Beijing Times (Chinese), reported buyers from Guangzhou had indeed arrived in the area, offering as much as 3 RMB per mouse. Now officials from Hunan say it isn’t so. From Reuters:

He Huaxian, a disease control official in Hunan’s plague-afflicted Yueyang county, denied a report in Information Times which said that trucks loaded with live rats from Hunan were headed for a local Guangzhou market, the China Daily reported on Tuesday.

“It is difficult to catch rats alive, and it is even more difficult to catch them alive in such great numbers,” the paper quoted He as saying. [Full Text]

Yesterday, John Kennedy at Global Voices translated some of the Internet chatter related to Dongting’s mouse problem. See: “Rodent population problem.”

[Image: A Dongting Lake farmer carries a trio of freshly killed field mice, via Beijing Times]