Frog breeders in southern China have appealed directly to authorities to allow them to keep rearing the animals despite a national ban on the wildlife trade triggered by a deadly coronavirus epidemic . The appeal was made in two petitions posted online – one by a group from Jiangmen in Guangdong province and the other by breeders in Hainan province. “The government’s forestry department has banned trading of all wild animals, including our 10,000 tonnes of domesticated Thai tiger frogs. Where do we go from here?” the Jiangmen breeders said in their petition, which included the names and phone numbers of more than 100 signatories. “Frog farming is no longer a source of living. The government asked us to try something else. What are we capable of doing?” they said, adding that 10,000 people were employed in the industry in Taishan county alone. The Hainan petition, which was signed by more than 700 people, also urged officials to consider the economic impact of shutting down an industry that it said employed around 6,000 people and involved 8,000 tonnes of livestock. “First of all, we are not breeding wildlife,” the group said. “Second, [farming frogs] can protect and repair the environment. Third, it gives farmers in Hainan a long-term solution in the development of the rural economy.” Chinese farmers began breeding Thai tiger frogs, or East Asian bullfrogs, as a source of food in the 1980s. A 2017 report by the Chinese Academy of Engineering estimated that frog breeding alone employed about 1 million people in a 50 billion yuan (US$7.15 billion) business in 2016. And in some of China’s most impoverished regions such as Guangxi, wildlife breeding is a key poverty alleviation strategy. But in a response to a coronavirus that has killed nearly 3,000 people and believed to have originated in wild animals, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s top lawmaking body, passed a resolution last week banning the trade and consumption of wild animals. It also indicated that changes to wildlife protection laws would follow. Chen Weiwen, one of those who signed the Guangdong petition, said he had yet to hear back from the authorities. “I am in despair,” Chen said. “I don’t know what to do. I hope everything will return to normal.” He said he had not been able to sell any of his inventory and he risked losing about 80,000 yuan, almost of all his earnings. “How do I change what I do now?” Chen said. “This is my 12th year [being a frog breeder]. I have a sizeable business and I am not a new guy. What we do is safe and we also eat what we breed.” Frog farmers in China have been among the most vocal in their concerns of losing their livelihood in the aftermath of the ban. In February, a group of defiant frog breeders on a subcommittee of the China Wildlife Conservation Association, an umbrella trade group, made their case against the ban in an online article arguing that it was part of a valuable tradition . The frog breeders drew parallels with other animal-related disease outbreaks such as avian flu, mad cow disease and African swine fever, arguing that the banning of farming and eating farmed frogs was unnecessary. But the umbrella association – which says it promotes sustainable development of the trade – quickly issued a public apology for the frog breeders’ comments and disbanded the subcommittee that released the article. Some of the earliest infections were found in people who had exposure to a wildlife market in Hubei’s provincial capital Wuhan, where bats, snakes, civets and other animals were sold. As a result there has been growing support to ban the trading and consumption of wild animals. In Shenzhen, China’s southern technology hub, the government is already moving to outlaw the eating of dogs and cats, permitting nine meats for consumption, including pork, chicken, beef and rabbit, as well as seafood. Hainan Normal University life sciences professor Shi Haitao said the government should consider introducing measures to help farmers to make the transition to other forms of income. “Many farmers previously joined the industry in response to the government’s call to encourage domestication and breeding [of exotic species], especially where wild animal domestication and breeding is used as a poverty alleviation project,” Shanghai-based news site The Paper quoted Shi as saying. “In terms of policies we can give them some time to slowly digest the inventory. Otherwise, not only will ordinary people suffer losses, but there will be the question of how these animals should be handled. There are risks of biological invasion and contagion of diseases if they are released back in the wild.” Additional reporting by Reuters