China's dead pigs crisis spreads to ducks China's dead pig crisis seems to have spread to another species as Chinese state media carried a report saying 1,000 rotten dead ducks had been found in a river in southwest China while the toll of dead pigs removed from Shanghai's water supply hit nearly 11,000. News of the latest dead animal flotilla comes from Pengshan county in China's Sichuan province, where a local government official told state radio at the weekend that partially decomposed ducks had been found in 50 to 60 woven plastic bags floating in the Nanhe river. Like the Shanghai authorities, he said the ducks posed no danger to the local water supply. And like the dead pigs that have been found floating in Shanghai's Huangpu river over the past fortnight, the cause of death of the ducks remains unknown. State media quoted the Pengshan official as saying that the duck carcases had been disinfected and buried, and "pose no threat to humans or livestock along the banks of the river" which is not a drinking water source. "How can you tell they are harmless when you don't know how the ducks died?" asked one microblogger on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, Sina Weibo, where humour has mixed with dismay as Chinese netizens react to China's latest environmental crisis. "First it was pork soup, now duck soup is available," wrote another. Pictures of Shanghai's floating pig carcases have been widely shared on social media sites and aired by television stations around the world. Several Weibo users expressed incredulity at government assurances that public health would be unaffected by such incidents. How can so many dead pigs and ducks have no impact on the environment? Is that a sign of just how bad our Chinese environment really is? The authorities should thoroughly investigate it: if it's a pestilence, it must be a really horrible one! The Shanghai government said at the weekend that the work of pulling pigs from the Huangpu river had nearly finished, though it has yet to provide an explanation of how they ended up there. The pigs are believed to have floated to Shanghai from the pig-rearing city of Jiaxing in neighbouring Zhejiang province. A local newspaper reported that one reason for such a large number of dead pigs being discarded into the river was that the government had cracked down on illegal traders who used to buy up dead pigs to make dumpling filling, leaving farmers with no way to dispose of pigs who die before slaughter, apart from river disposal.