“When the [Chinese] government shut it down, many of us were totally surprised – we didn’t expect they would do it… in the past, the government wholeheartedly supported wildlife breeding,” said Dr Peter Li, an associate professor of East Asian Politics and Animal Policy at the University of Houston-Downtown, and a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School.

“But since 2020, there’s been a drastic reduction in the sales,” he added. “The public display of wildlife meat has mostly gone – you still see a small number of restaurants breaking the laws, but the largest scale operations have shut down.”

But while Dr Li and others applaud Beijing’s actions they note that the trade has not died off, but has been displaced into parts of Southeast Asia. Dr Li now wants those countries to follow China’s example and ban the farms springing up across Thailand and Laos.

But others warn this could push the trade underground, making it harder to introduce disease surveillance mechanisms and hurting people’s livelihoods. A better solution, said Mr Sorawit, is to properly regulate the farms – otherwise, the industry will again emerge somewhere else. Similar debates have played out over informal livestock and game-meat trades elsewhere, including Europe.

Mr Suriyan’s backyard operation began almost by accident. Some seven years ago – as he tried to buy one of the animals as a pet – he realised there was a gap in the market.

“I called every farm and the answer was always the same: wait a few months,” said the 53-year-old. “Then I called one farm and he said he could actually help me buy enough for a whole farm. So I just bought it all!”

Suddenly, Mr Suriyan and his wife, Bussaba Thima, had 100 rodents. They constructed the facility beside their two-storey house and started to breed the animals – each pair of bamboo rats deliver a new litter of pups twice a year.

Still, it took some time to figure out their business plan. Baby bamboo rats could easily be sold as pets: “exotic” animals like this are becoming more and more popular in Thailand, where social media is facilitating a flourishing and controversial market. But if the rodents went unsold during that window, they became harder to sell as adults.